Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them

In 1814, at the height of his fame, the poet, libertine and freedom fighter Lord Byron had his head examined. Not by a proto-psychiatrist but by the German phrenologist and physician Johann Spurzheim, who, after making a detailed study of the no doubt amused Byron’s cranium, pronounced the brain to be ‘very antithetical’ and said that it was an organ in which ‘good and evil are at perpetual war’.

Two centuries after Byron’s death, this dichotomy is as pronounced as ever when it comes to analyses of the poet. His defenders point to his wit, his poetic genius, his heroic efforts in defence of Greek liberty and his personal flair; not for nothing has the word ‘Byronic’ entered the vocabulary as a largely admiring adjective. His detractors, meanwhile, suggest that he was an abuser of women, a pederast and a profoundly overrated poet, whose once lauded work now feels overblown and hollow, with the exception of Don Juan and a few of the lyrics.