Steve Poole is Reader in social and cultural history at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and the director of the university's Regional History Centre. His publications on popular radicalism in the Hanoverian period include The Politics of Regicide in England, 1750-1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester University Press, 2000) and he is editor of John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (Pickering and Chatto, 2009) and Captain Swing Reconsidered: Forty Years of Rural History from Below (Southern History Society, 2010).