Byron Bits 8: Juan & Older Women
She was not old, nor young, nor at the yearsWhich certain people call a ‘certain Age,‘Which yet the most uncertain age appears… Lord Byron, Beppo xxii (181...
Category: Stories
Dificile est propria communia dicere…
Byron Bits 7: Sex and Instagram
Byron's comic epic Don Juan is on the surface a boy's own adventure but it soon becomes apparent that it's not boys who are not driving the narrative.
More Byron Bits
Byron Bits are short talks on Lord Byron's greatest poem. BB5 and BB6 explore the penultimate episodes in the unfinished poem and ponder what point Byron was tr...
Byron Bits: short talks on Don Juan
Byron Bits: short recorded talks on Lord Byron and his great, unfinished poem, Don Juan.
Byron’s uncle Fred the Caricaturist
Byron's uncle Frederick George was a satirical cartoonist in the 1780s and early 1790s
The Venetian Cantos of Don Juan
Byron wrote Cantos I and II in Venice, amid the excesses of Carnivale in 1818 and 1819 — his excesses, at least — and just before he fell in love...
The Narration of Don Juan
In brief: I’m preparing to publish (“free”) an annotated and narrated edition of Cantos I & II of Byrons’ Don Juan on the bicentenary of their fir...
Death in Don Juan
If Don Juan is lots of fun, as I claim, why does death figure in it so frequently?
Don Juan: who needs it, who reads it?
In a previous article I lamented that Byron’s great comic poem Don Juan is not read as widely as it deserves. As the greatest comic poem in the languag...
Don Juan: The Greatest Comic Poem in English
Why isn't Don Juan more widely read? I examine three reasons in this series of posts and then suggest some remedies.