DJ: But if we hadn't had this cult of the personality then could Hitler have, as it were, enlisted him — along with other figures such as Goethe — in the way that he did?

TB: This is quite an interesting phenomenon and I think this does come with Romanticism. The Romantic heroes, the artistic heroes, are the first artistic creators to have not just admirers but fans; they have a following, they have a cult. I suppose there had been a cult of Michelangelo but with the Romantics there is a cult of Byron, a cult of Beethoven, a cult of Wagner. The relationship between public and the artist is quasi-religious. 

JB: It's so interesting because the cult of Shakespeare is something that actually emerges in this period. It begins to take off with Garrick, partly in furtherance of his own career, who launches this idolisation of Shakespeare. The key moment of the idea of Shakespeare as a cult object occurs in the 1790s, where there's this extraordinary story of a young man called William Henry Ireland, who starts forging Shakespearean artefacts. Boswell goes down on his knees and kisses the document that Ireland has forged because he thinks he's in touch with something that has come directly from the hand of Shakespeare. That sense of the cult of the artist, whether it's a fan of Byron in the present or Shakespeare as a cult figure from the past, is bound up with the sense that Romanticism is a form of secular religion. Once you begin to have the whole Enlightenment critique of the established church and the cult of the saints, you see the emergence of a cult of artists instead. So you have objects of veneration, whether it's a lock of John Keats's hair or a bit of wood supposedly from Shakespeare's mulberry tree. 

TB: There is something else about Shakespeare that comes out quite clearly from your book on the subject (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, OUP) and that is that Shakespeare is adopted as a national figure; he's not just a cultural hero, he's a national hero. And for very obvious reasons: the speeches from Henry V, Richard II and so on. That helps to explain why it was in the 18th century, with English nationalism and possibly British nationalism too — but that's a fraught territory where we oughtn't to tread today — that Shakespeare emerges as a cult figure who can be paraded as someone who sums up all the quintessential virtues of the English nation. 

JB: One of the respects in which I very much agreed with the argument of your book was the assessment of when Romanticism begins. Academics are always interested in when movements end and with questions of origin: when can you say Romanticism begins? There have been lots of different arguments about that. To me the two crucial starting points are the work of Rousseau, a book like Emile — the book on education which starts the whole idealisation of child-centred learning, which was then banned because of its irreligion. The other starting point would be the cult of Ossian, the discovery of Fingal's Cave; the idea, which emerges in the 1760s, that maybe British culture has some kind of Homeric bard figure. The great paradox of Romanticism is surely that on the one hand it is to do with individualism and on the other hand it's very closely bound up with nationalism. 

TB: Yes, just so. There's a tension there between the individual and the group. I don't think that's so very surprising. Certainly no German, raised on a diet of dialectics, would find that surprising at all because once the Romantic artist has, as it were, gone inside himself and has stripped down everything which is inherited or comes from outside, and it's all just down to the inner voice, the inner light within, it's a bleak and lonely place. So not surprisingly they reach out redoubled with enthusiasm for some kind of collective haven within which they can seek refuge. The nation, especially for the Germans, and to a lesser extent the Italians later, presented itself as an obvious place in which to find a collective warmth. 

JB: Then there's this extraordinary paradox about the way this develops politically. Clearly you can trace the line from Romantic nationalism through to the Nazis. But at the same time, if you think about a figure like Heine — who was a friend of Marx's in 1830s Paris — or the Young Italy movement, that Romantic line could be traced through into the Communist Manifesto. 

TB: Yes you can, that's certainly true. Where I have a bit of a problem with Heine is that his attitude to Romanticism was rather like Byron's. They have this in common that they are detached, they are deeply ironic, and so consequently they are prone to making self-disparaging remarks in which they distance themselves from what they identify clearly as a Romantic culture. So Heine wrote quite a lengthy piece warning the French in particular — he was living in Paris as an exile at the time — against the dangers of German Romanticism, warning them that out of all that stuff about witches and hobgoblins and the night and the darkness pretty ugly things could come. In many respects he's really very prescient: it was after all Heine who said that where they burn books, they'll be burning people next.