Adam Sisman has written about the 'electric poetic partnership' of Wordsworth and Coleridge in a new book, 'The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge'.

Miranda Seymour's review says:

'The ebbs and flows of their passionate friendship survived the failure of Wordsworth to produce the vast philosophical opus that Coleridge had conceived and laid upon his friend’s drooping shoulders ??" outlasted, even, the awful moment in 1810 when Coleridge, an opium addict, learned that Wordsworth “had no hope of me” and thought he was “rotting out his entrails by intemperance”.'

The relationship has been studied before but this one looks good. When a friendship survives between two 'proud and complex men' it is always rather fascinating to observe.

The extraordinary tale of the friendship of Raïssa and Jacques Maritain is recounted by Robert Ellsberg in The Social Edge:

'Raïssa, a Russian émigré of Jewish descent, met Jacques when they were both students at the Sorbonne. They were instantly attracted and decided to marry. But they also shared a passionate quest for the Truth - so deep that they made a mutual pact to kill themselves after a year if they couldn't discover the meaning of life. Fortunately, through their friendship with various philosophers and writers they were both drawn to become Catholics. Jacques became a world-famous philosopher. Raïssa, a poet and contemplative, was lesser known, though Thomas Merton called her "one of the great contemplatives of our time." Jacques and Raïssa became Benedictine Oblates and took a vow of celibacy. Nevertheless, they felt that their religious vocation was not in a religious order but in the midst of the world - particularly among the intellectual and artistic circles in which they were immersed.'

Hume was famously a man of impeccable character.

Rousseau famously fell out with everyone, apart from his dog.

But 'Rousseau's Dog', by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, retells the story of the two philosophers' friendship. And Hume does not come out of it so well. Duplicitous is the word. Extract here...

As Narnia mania ramps up, C.S.Lewis' life is in the spotlight. He was, for a while, good friends with Tolkien and it is a bit of a story.

When they first met, as academics at Oxford, Lewis was a protestant atheist, Tolkien a catholic believer. However, their common interest in all things linguistic, legendary and Nordic brought them together. The bond was sealed when Lewis became a Christian. Lewis was one of the first people to whom Tolkien showed 'The Hobbit'.

However, Tolkien did not like the Narnia stories (too cutesy and confused, he thought) - which was something of a blow to Lewis. When Lewis married a divorcee and didn't tell the catholic Tolkien, the end of the friendship was nigh.

Though it does seem that they had something of a reconciliation when Lewis was dying: they recognised that the friendship had been hugely important to each of them, though almost inevitably fractious given the passion with which they pursued their close, but not identical, interests.

Who were the 'fair youth' and the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets? The tentative consensus is William Herbert, the young Earl of Pembroke, and a Moorish or African prostitute (the question was asked again last night in the TV drama, A Waste of Shame). The nameless dark lady then disappears even more from view since, to the modern mind, all the fascination is with Shakespeare's sexuality (for which read homosexuality).

What is truly interesting, though, is to sidestep the matter of whether he 'was', 'wasn't' or 'was sometimes' and try to imagine the different world of intimacy Shakespeare occupied. Two aspects stand out.

First, the association between intimacy and privacy that we naturally make was rather different. People routinely slept, bathed and ate together outside of family ties. Extensive bodily contact was not exceptional and perhaps, in adulthood, only shared with one other person as it is now; it was commonplace. The boundaries between sexual intimacy, affection, knock-about, indifferent touch (and, no doubt, various shades of abuse) were, probably, far less clear.

Second, the notion of the carnal was far broader. Today carnal means sexual. Before the 17th century it would be more accurate to say it meant worldly (the opposite of spiritual or godly). So carnal relations were relationships that sought to exploit others for material gain or were relationships characterised by emotions such as envy or hatred. In other words, whilst it would be wrong to say the Medieval and Tudor periods were permissive, it is probably fair to say that for much of the time they were far less obsessed with sex; sex might not have been the worst crime in immoral relations (again, an odd thought for an age that easily associates a religious mindset with a puritanical one).

In other words, the question of who the 'fair youth' and the 'dark lady' were might not have occurred to Shakespeare's contemporaries. Perhaps many or most could identify with the polymorphous passions that he so powerfully captured in the sonnets and would have thought that our obsession with the 'who' rather misses the point of his glorious verse.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

(Sonnet 30)

I read that Goethe and Schiller had a wonderful friendship.

"In his theatrical endeavors, Goethe found a sympathetic and encouraging critic in Schiller, to whom he owed in great measure his renewed interest in poetry. After years of tentative approaches on Schiller's part, years in which that poet concealed even from himself his desire for a friendly understanding with Goethe, the favorable moment arrived; it was in June 1794, when Schiller was seeking collaborators for his new periodical Die Horen; and his invitation addressed to Goethe was the beginning of a friendship which continued unbroken until the younger poets death. The friendship of Goethe and Schiller, of which their correspondence is a priceless record, had its limitations; it was purely intellectual in character, a certain barrier of personal reserve being maintained to the last. But for the literary life of both poets the gain was incommensurable. As far as actual work was concerned, Goethe went his own way as he had always been accustomed to do; but the mere fact that he devoted himself with increasing interest to literature was due to Schiller's stimulus. It was Schiller, too, who induced him to undertake those studies on the nature of epic and dramatic poetry which resulted in the epic of Hermann und Dorothea and the fragment of the Achilleis; without the friendship there would have been no Xenien (1795) and no ballads, and it was his younger friend's encouragement which induced Goethe to betake himself once more to the misty path of Faust, and, in 1808, bring the first part of that drama to a conclusion." (From the online who's who NNDB )

This is possibly the earliest image we have of two named friends. They are Harmodius and Aristogeiton. They tried to kill the Greek tyrants Hipparchus and Hippias in 514BC and became heroes of Athenian democracy. The statue stood in the Agora, representing freedom. This Roman copy of the original is in Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

Brilliant friendship can inspire brilliant friends to even more brilliant achievements. This is friendship as challenge; friendship as in he or she 'is my greatest critic'; friendship nurtured by seeing, and striving, for the same truth. MoMA, in New York, is showing the works of Cezanne and Pissarro - two 19th century artists who became creative soulmates. According to one critic, the show 'debates inspiration and incentive, and it champions the cooperative underpinnings of success'; it shows 'the art of shared ambition.' I hope I get to see it!

The grandson of David Lloyd George has published a new book about the friendship between the liberal prime minister and Winston Churchill. What is fascinating about this is that the two had good reason to loathe, not love, each other. The things they had in common were that they were both liberals for a time, and were both wartime prime ministers. But up to and during the Second World War, the two fell out politically: Lloyd George said he didn't trust Churchhill's judgement, and thought him impetuous, egotistical and war-mongering. So how could the friendship endure such pretty ferocious critique? 'I think they recognised a kind of genius in each other and they had enormous fun together,' says Robert Lloyd George, the grandson. They were the two key UK political figures in the first half of the 20th century and they admired that in each other. To put it in the language of Aristotle, they loved each other's character; and the love of someone's character transcends the ambivalent feelings you might have about what they otherwise do. You may hope that they do not do; you may row and cajole. But at the end of the day, each finds it within themselves to be humble, to laugh and to admire - aspects of character that sustain the deepest friendships.