Volume VIII opens with Byron in Ravenna, in 1821. His passion for the Countess Guiccioli is subsiding into playful fondness, and he confesses to his sister Augusta that he is not "so furiously in love as at first." Italy, meanwhile, is afire with the revolutionary activities of the Carbornari, which Byron sees as "the very poetry of politics."

This gripping and important book brings alive over two hundred years of humanitarian interventions. Freedom’s Battle illuminates the passionate debates between conscience and imperialism ignited by the first human rights activists in the 19th century, and shows how a newly emergent free press galvanized British, American, and French citizens to action by exposing them to distant atrocities. Wildly romantic and full of bizarre enthusiasms, these activists were pioneers of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about today’s human rights crises.

This book is a description of the people that had created the 'Dandy Movement' as a free expression of human's feeling against any common moral law of their time and present time.

For thousands of years we have recorded real lives--the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama? Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact--by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others--Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.

This unique collection of lectures honors the pioneering work in Byron studies of Leslie Alexis Marchand, who has had an enduring influence on the appreciation and study of Lord Byron for sixty years. Generations of readers and writers have come to Byron through his biographies and his edition of the poet’s letters and journals. All admirers of Byron respond to the verve, dash, and immediacy of his correspondence, which lies at the heart of Marchand’s biographies and offers us a portrait based on the poet’s views of himself and his times. No one has so powerfully and judiciously allowed Byron’s life to emerge from the testimony of his letters. Many readers, from his contemporaries to our day, have refused to separate the poet from his troubled dark heroes, and see little but strands of autobiography in the poems. But the letters and journals reveal him in a very different light. Leslie Marchand provided these documents for the first time in their unexpurgated and authoritative form. This collection pays tribute to Marchand’s careful scholarship and scrupulous attention to the limits of interpretation. Marchand’s continued relevance to Byron studies derives in part from the work undertaken by those inspired by his labors as editor and interpreter; many of whom are represented in this collection. Three opening essays bear personal witness to his fervent support for young scholars, his depth of expertise and appeal as a teacher, and his commitment to encouraging others to join him on his Byron pilgrimage. The lectures themselves represent such diverse disciplines as literary theory, psychiatry, publishing history, comparative literature, drama, political history, revolutionary politics in literature and music, literary criticism, textual editing and selection, and literary influence. A chronology and a bibliography provide an overview of his life and scholarship.

Using diverse sources ranging from hagiographies and historiographies to historical novels and satirical poems, this is the first book-length examination of Emmanouil Roidis’ Pope Joan (1866). Providing a long-overdue and authoritative introduction to the sinuous poetics of one of the most celebrated Modern Greek novels, Roidis and the Borrowed Muse takes in a broad gamut of British writers, from Swift, Sterne and Gibbon to Scott, Macaulay and Byron, and casts a fresh and original eye on the intertextual connections between their work and Roidis’ magnum opus. This comprehensive comparative study will appeal not only to intellectual historians, literary critics and students, but also to scholars of Romanticism and readers interested in the many facets of satire.

This definitive edition, the first since 1974, presents all the poetry of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), including his play, Irene, with detailed, wide-ranging commentary. It has been expertly edited with attention to the extant manuscripts and all relevant printings. The volume includes the entirety of Johnson’s verse in all its generic diversity: including satire, ode, elegy, verse drama, and verse prayer. The poems are presented in their original spelling and punctuation with extensive commentary on their literary background—biblical, classical, and modern—as well as careful explanation of unusual words, allusions to historical figures, and references to contemporary events that appear in the poems. Proceeding chronologically, this edition also situates Johnson’s verse in the context of his life from his early days in Lichfield to his career as an author in London. Unlike all earlier editions, the present offering provides full translations of all the Latin and Greek poems on which Johnson based so much of his English verse. Correspondingly, it provides the English poems which some of his Latin verse translates. Neither in the presentation of the verse nor in the commentary does this edition assume a command of foreign languages: it aims to be useful for all students of Samuel Johnson’s poetry.