Byron and Bob is the first book ever to be dedicated to the most important literary relationship in Byron’s career – that with the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, whom he hated, and to whom he “dedicated” his most important poem, Don Juan. Drawing on much unseen manuscript material, Peter Cochran shows that although Byron’s antipathy towards Southey was at first a normal literary distaste, it became, the more he ingested his private image of Southey, a projected self-distrust, a dislike of everything in himself with which he was unhappy.

The book has as appendix a double edition...

Byron and Hobby-O is about the relationship between Byron and his supposed best friend, John Cam Hobhouse. It is the first full-length biographical study of Hobhouse in over fifty years, and is much franker and more intimate than anything preceding. It shows how, while the two men were initially collaborators and rivals, Byron rapidly outstretched Hobhouse in poetry, while Hobhouse, in the longer term, outstretched Byron in politics.

It shows how long acquaintance with the elusive and chameleonic Byron turned Hobhouse into a canter and humbug of the kind Byron hated, and concludes with...

Byron’s Religions is the most comprehensive study yet of the poet’s deep, diverse and eclectic attitude to religion. The articles, by several well-known and distinguished scholars, cover many of his poems and plays, taking in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Blasphemy, Calvinism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The tentative conclusion is that Byron was never the atheist which the cliché has him to be, but a man whose profound need for a faith clashed always with an equally profound scepticism.

Byron and Women [and men] is a compilation of new biographical and literary essays, examining the poet’s bisexuality and the ways in which it affected his poetry and drama. Areas covered are Byron and gender-studies (a general introduction); Byron’s Boyfriends (an aspect of his life which has traditionally been neglected); the Male Gaze in the Oriental Tales; homosexuality in Venice; Byron’s Nottinghamshire love-life; sex and gender in Don Juan; bisexuality in Byron and Shakespeare; and Byron’s heroines contrasted with those of Mozart. The volume has as appendices new editions of the...