Lord Byron - Exile on Fame Street (Omnibus 2002)

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets.

Lord Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, later travelling extensively across Europe to places such as Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats. During his stay in Italy, he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a folk hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Sieges of Missolonghi.

Dubbed "mad, bad and dangerous to know" by one of his many lovers, Lord Byron was a prototype celebrity whose legend has not diminished with the passage of time. Omnibus looks at the man behind the myth and his legacy.