Spanish theologian, priest, poet, journalist and literary critic. His full name was José María Blanco Crespo. White fled Spain for Britain during the War of Independence, and ran the periodical El Español (1810-1814) from London. He is best known for his work “Letters from Spain” (1822). He also wrote “Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism” and “Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy”. He became an Anglican cleric and wrote various ecclesiastical poetry. “To Night” was described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘the finest sonnet in the English language’. Blanco exchanged letters with American Unitarians, Andrews Norton and William Ellery Channing and also with John Stuart Mill. His last six years were spent in Liverpool where he was a member of the city’s Unitarian Church. He was buried in the Renshaw Street chapels cemetery, which is now the site of the Roscoe Memorial Gardens in Mount Pleasant. A tablet in the cloister of Ullet Road Church, in this city also, memorializes Blanco White. (bio by: José L Bernabé Tronchoni)