Byron’s life, it seems, was without a single dull moment, but MacCarthy ( William Morris, 1995, etc.) fails to convey any of the excitement or undeniable glamour of his days. Moreover, Byron wrestled with extraordinary demons: an absent father, an overweening and unhinged mother, a disfiguring handicap, an unreconciled and insatiable homosexuality, cycles of depression that sent him “veering between lassitude and hyperactivity, haunted by nightmare images and assailed by a sense of the uselessness of human endeavor.” Throughout a life packed with action and sometimes misbegotten enterprise, Byron managed to write such resonant poems as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, to inspire Mary Shelley to pen Frankenstein (on something of a dare), to advance the cause of Greek independence against the Turks, and to set an example for bad-boy artists henceforth.

He had all the rock star turns, after all: he thrived on shocking society, wrote ardent lyrics, wore such outré duds as “a frogged greatcoat and ‘a curious foreign cap,’ ” figured prominently in gossip columns, traveled everywhere and in the worst of company, and died at the tender age of 35.

Think of Jim Morrison, or maybe Kurt Cobain, and you’ll have an idea of how George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) was perceived by the young people of his time.

A densely detailed, lackluster life of the eminent poet, adventurer, and enfant terrible.

Byron by Fiona MacCarthy