JB: It's rather different in England because the aesthetic and the political become so closely intertwined in later English Romanticism. I would regard the key figures in the late-19th-century development of Romanticism in England as being John Ruskin, William Morris and A. C. Swinburne. It seems to me, particularly thinking about the political spin on Romantic medievalism that you get through Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and William Morris's form of Romantic idealism, it's an aesthetic and political movement at the same time. 

DJ: Surely, the main movement in early Romanticism in England is rather from Left to Right. Obviously there are exceptions like Hazlitt and so on.

JB: That's where you get this inter-generational parricide, as it were, in English Romanticism. You begin with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and the circle around Godwin and Wollstonecraft, all welcoming the revolution — Wordsworth actually famously being there in Paris, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!" But then as the revolution turns to the terror, and then particularly with the extinction of the Swiss republic, the first generation of Romantics turn against the revolution, they see it as destroying rather than bringing liberty. So by the time you get to the Regency period in England and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey have all moved to the Right and Coleridge goes on to become one of the most formative conservative thinkers in a book like On the Constitution of Church and State. That's where the younger generation of Hazlitt, Shelley, Keats and Byron react against the first generation and are trying to carry forward radical ideas. Think of Shelley's reaction to the Peterloo massacre, for instance.

TB: The war is very important. It's something of a watershed: 1793 comes and in January Louis XVI has his head chopped off — a pretty big shock — then war with revolutionary France follows. Anyone who has any illusions about the French Revolution bringing a new world of humanity and brotherly love were certainly very rapidly disillusioned by the events of the 1790s so the war has a big impact.

JB: And then by the time that the Pope crowns Napoleon as Emperor, Wordsworth says this is like a dog returning to its vomit.

DJ: That's the moment that Beethoven switches, isn't it?

TB: Yes. Beethoven's a very interesting case. He can be seen in a way as a weather vane of attitudes towards politics. I don't think he was political. Again, here's someone very much influenced by Schiller; his primary concern was always aesthetic. Not just in the world of music but also in the German-speaking world Beethoven was regarded as the great mould-breaker. The real turning point for him was the Eroica. The Eroica has very little to do with Napoleon, and everything to do with Beethoven's inner turmoil, precipitated by sexual frustration and by his growing deafness. So it could be argued that the Eroica is the most revolutionary work that had been created in music until that point. So you're quite right, Beethoven does either tear up or score out the name of Napoleon Bonaparte on the score, that's certainly true. He was deeply disillusioned by Bonaparte turning out to be just another power-crazed politician. But he also, and we can trace this quite well because after he'd gone deaf he wrote down answers to questions which were presented to him in written form, still doesn't have a carefully articulated political programme, but his instincts remain liberal. Certainly he could be identified as a man of the Left in his social and political attitudes, critical as he was of the Habsburg regime. But then there's a very interesting book by an American musicologist called Stephen Rumph (Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works, University of California Press), which suggests that Beethoven becomes more conservative as he grows older — as many of us do.