The lines are immaterial

I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, ‘He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.’

Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that ‘there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject’. She does not tell us hers, but examination of the godlike image is bound to have been one of them, for she gives us Byron in all his sound and fury, his ‘madness’, drunkenness, arrogance, melancholy, irreverence and of course his Olympian excesses in love.