Search archive Receive updates Enter your email address to receive regular updates about NS and related events. Ever since, biographers have been trying to make up for the loss. The attractions of the challenge are obvious. The toast of a new era of mass readership, he was also its first and greatest victim. The parabola of his rise and fall retains its fascination to this day, for hooked as we are on the cult of celebrity, Byron's myth still serves as the archetype.
Myth can be dangerous for a biographer.
Not the least of Benita Eisler's virtues is her sensitivity to the brilliance with which Byron fashioned his own image. His public posturing was only a part of this. Yet it may be that in Benita Eisler the Napoleon of rhyme has at last met his Waterloo. This is the most perspicacious and convincing portrait of Byron I have read. It combines an instinctive sympathy for the power of Byron's self-dramatising with a refusal to do as so many other biographers have done, and either take it at face value or discount it altogether.