BYRON: A Life in Ten Letters
by Andrew Stauffer (Cambridge University Press, $50 hb, ebook)
Two hundred years ago, on April 19, 1824, Lord Byron died unexpectedly in Greece. Banished from British society for his shocking behaviour towards his wife, Byron had settled in Italy, but in 1823, sailed from Genoa to support the Greeks in their battles against the Ottoman Empire. Even in exile he was probably Britain’s most famous writer, and certainly its most infamous. His poetry sold tens of thousands of copies in his lifetime and inspired generations of artists, from Pushkin and Tchaikovsky to Schumann and Delacroix.
As Andrew
