Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at the vicarage at Ottery St Mary in 1772.He was the son of the Rev John Taylor, and it is said that he had a pretty miserable childhood.But he loved the countryside around Ottery St Mary, and he often walked along the River Otter.

When his father died, Samuel was sent to school in London at the age of 10. This was where he really became an avid reader, and where his interest in writing was born. He also took an interest in other things too...opium, alcohol and women.

His addiction to opium probably started following an illness in the 1790s, for which he took laudanum. It's at around this time, too, that he started to get into debt. So what did he do to get himself out of debt...he joined the army!

Here was a man ill-equipped to fight and who was no horse-rider, to put it mildly. In fact, he only managed to join the army at all after making up a name - Silas Tomkyn Comberbache (he obviously used some poetic licence here).

In the end, his family arranged his discharge and he went to Cambridge, which is where he met his wife, Sara - and his great friend, William Wordsworth.

Coleridge's famous work, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1797 as part of the Lyrical Ballads poems.Lyrical Ballads was published with Wordsworth...and so the Romantic movement was born.

Coleridge went to Malta in 1804, where he hoped the warmer climate would cure an illness. While there, it's said he did some spying for Britain.

He returned home two years later, still unwell and still addicted to opium. Barely able to work, he asked Sara for a divorce.He died of a heart condition in 1834 at the age of 61.

His lasting legacy of course is the poem, Kubla Khan - which talks of Xanadu and the pleasure dome. Which raises the question: was he under the influence of something at the time? The likelihood is that he may well have been.

A plaque in honour of the poet can be found on the churchyard wall in Ottery St Mary.

Comedian Peter Cook was described by most people who met him as the wittiest man they knew.

The satirist - best known for his work with Dudley Moore - was born in Bronshill Road, Torquay in November 1937.

The house was within cheering distance of Plainmoor, the home of Torquay United, who he supported all his life (along with Spurs).

Cook was born and brought up by his nan, because his father Alexander was a diplomat in Nigeria and his mother, Margaret, didn't want the young Peter growing up there.

As Peter Cook explained: "I was conceived in Nigeria but born in Devon because my mother had this obsession about newborn babies catching malaria in the middle of downtown Lagos. So I was reared in Torquay."

Cook himself was expected to follow his father into the diplomatic service but, as he said himself, "we ran out of colonies."