Percy Bysshe Shelley
The soldier poet: Viva Byron!, by Hugh Thomson, reviewed
What would have happened had Lord Byron fought for Simon Bolivar in Latin America, rather than dying of fever in Missolonghi, campaigning for Greek independence?
A free spirit: Clairmont, by Lesley McDowell, reviewed
Even by the Villa Diodati’s standards, Claire Clairmont was unconventional, seducing Byron when she was 18, and giving birth to their child after a possible affair with Shelley
Shelley addict
Last week I heard the actor Julian Sands give a virtuoso performance of work by Percy Bysshe Shelley to mark…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Passionate pioneers
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
The house-party from hell
It is perhaps the most celebrated house-party in the history of literary tittle-tattle: a two-house-party to be precise. Byron and…
