There is nothing perversely original about it, nothing obstinately wrong-headed, nothing narrowly partisan or mean in its sympathies, and if these seem negative virtues they are not so common in the Byron world as to be taken for granted. O’Brien begins with the familiar miseries of his parentage and childhood, and rattles on through all the crucial phases and friendships — Newstead and his nurse, Harrow and Clare, Cambridge and Edleston, Greece, Turkey and just about anyone of either sex you care to mention — that brought him finally to the publication of Childe Harold,  the attentions of Caroline Lamb, marriage to the ‘Princess of the Parallelograms’ and the three-cornered relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, that forms the core of this book.

There is again nothing fresh to be added here, but the unfolding tragedy of ostracism, exile and redemption in the cause of Greek freedom remains as compelling as ever. It was one of the bitterer ironies of Byron’s life that the only way that he could do the wretched Greeks any good was by dying for them, but if O’Brien’s book did nothing else it would provide an entertaining reminder of just how much living he got in first. ‘Confess — confess — you dog,’ Byron himself wrote to Kinnaird of his Don Juan that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing — it may be bawdy — but is it not good English? — it may be profligate — but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it — who has not lived in the world? — who has not tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? — in a vis-a- vis? —  on a table ? — and under it?

No, I suppose not. But if, as ever, Byron has said it more vividly than anyone else could, it is not hard to see why so many have wanted jump on the vis-a-vis with him and have a try.

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