Bücher der Reihe Lord Byron

"Good night-or rather, morning. It is four, and the dawn gleams over the Grand Canal, and unshadows the Rialto. I must to bed; up all night - but, 'it's life, though, damme, it's life!' "An Englishman in Italy, Lord Byron's life in Venice is full of fun, laughter, and devil-may-care romancing - until he meets his last and truest love, the eighteen-year-old Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, for whom he risks everything, even the danger to his own life; and moreso, his own pride.Every part of Venice is reflected in his poetry - walking across the bridge that connects the Doge's Palace to the prisons from which none returned, he invented the name that made it famous all over the world, "The Bridge of Sighs", because of the sad sighs, he believed, that those condemned prisoners would release on seeing Venice and freedom for the last time.But it is his letters back home to England that bring Venice and its people to life with irresistible high spirits, bewitching and picturesque, with rumours and jokes and flippant with effervescent self-ridicule, occasionally solemn, but not often."No one need doubt that the letters, perhaps even more than 'Don Juan,' are the beginning and middle and the end of Lord Byron." - Michael Ratcliffe in The Times

The Man ... The Poet ... The LegendHaving left England behind him, Lord Byron arrives on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he meets the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont. Four young people seeking a new life.All are brought to life in that happy and haunted summer of true friendship, love, and story-telling; when during a period of stormy weather over the Alps, Mary writes 'Frankenstein'; and Byron writes 'The Vampyre', later plagiarised and published by his physician John William Polidori.Based on their own words in the letters and journals of Byron, Shelley, and Mary, the author brings the reader inside the Villa Diodati to vividly share in the world of these leading icons of the Romantic Movement during that famous summer in 1816.

From Venice to Ravenna and on to Pisa and Genoa, Lord Byron's journey through life and Italy continues. But now he is a man sincerely in love with only one woman, living in a quasi-domesticated happiness with her; until his own nation of Britain makes a political request of him - insisting he is the only man who can do it - and so once again he courageously dons the red military uniform of a commissioned British officer, and leaves Italy - knowing the hardest stage of his journey still stretched ahead."There was a helplessness about Byron, a sort of abandonment of himself to his destiny, as he called it. He believed in fate. And when fate spoke to him clearly, he always answered the call."-------- Quinnell