Harrow School, alma mater of kings and prime ministers, produced also the two most popular poets of the Romantic age. There was Byron and there was Procter, the first of whom won sales and eternal fame, the second, even when he changed his name to Barry Cornwall, won only the sales. Cornwall covered many of the same subjects as “Johnny Keats” but was a better seller by far, marketing himself aggressively to his female fan club and prompting the accolade from one of them that “Everybody’s talking about Barry Cornwall”. In Commentary this week, Richard Marggraf Turley argues that the successful poet on one very important occasion also helped the unsuccessful one, turning the “tide of negative reviews” for Keats’s Lamia. Cornwall, it seems, deserves some critical reconsideration himself – and not just for helping a rival in need.

The celebrity of the author and salon hostess Germaine de Staël has maintained itself solidly for 200 years while that of her partner, Benjamin Constant, has fallen further behind. They were the Sartre and Beauvoir of the post-Jacobin years – with a genius for brilliant conversation, especially when it was between themselves. Most of the evidence for this is inevitably lost but, as our reviewer Biancamaria Fontana describes, a new “dual biography” brings back to life some of their literary and social world.

Alison Gopnik considers books on child psychology, a field long associated with another influential Parisian couple, Jean and Valentine Piaget. New “sticky mitten” studies, involving three-month old babies in Velcro gloves, have given fresh insights into how children’s minds begin to work.

Who is the typical Londoner now? A Norwegian married to an Algerian? Paul Barker reviews Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, pen portraits of life in a single street, tackling both our relationship to objects and what it means to belong to our home city.

Peter Stothard

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