Lord Byron is best-known as a Romantic poet, but throughout his short life he was also a prolific letter writer and occasional keeper of a journal. He wrote his memoirs, too, which were widely circulated in manuscript, but, alas for posterity, were destroyed a month after his death by his friend John Cam Hobhouse and his publisher John Murray, who feared their publication would damage the poet’s reputation. This new selection of Byron’s prose – mostly letters – is arranged chronologically and linked by so much informed, sympathetic and well-researched explanatory material that it amounts to a sort of biography.Byron was ambivalent about Romanticism, frequently ridiculing the Lake Poets such as Wordsworth and Southey for their sentimentality: he had in fact one foot