"Born in a hotel on Cross Street in 1785, Thomas De Quincey is perhaps the greatest local-born writer in Manchester history.

He came from a wealthy family that lived in glorious countryside near Moss Side but ended up on the streets of London's West End as a penniless drug addict. This experience inspired his most famous work, Confessions of An English Opium Eater, a memoir laced not just with drug-fuelled hallucinations but passages of the most mesmerising prose.

In Manchester he ran away from the Grammar School, later visited the Portico Library (which he mentions inConfessions) and mourned at family graves at St Ann's Church.

Retrace De Quincey's wayward steps with Ed Glinert, Penguin author and editor of Penguin Classics' Sherlock Holmes stories."