News & Notes

In common with much of Europe, I have not ventured far from home in several months. Shopping for essentials, daily exercise and very little else. There has been a great deal of time for thinking, and early on I came to the conclusion that I was more or less living the...

February 19th 1817: Ash Wednesday, and the Carnival festivities in Venice have come to an end for another year. Byron, newly-returned from a masked ball at Gran Teatro La Fenice, writes a short letter to his sister Augusta, apologising for his brevity thus, I have...

January 12th 1817. Although he will not know of it for some time, on this day Lord Byron becomes a father again, with the birth of Claire Clairmont’s daughter. The child is born in Bath, the early nineteenth century resort for ladies who are “unwell” and needing...

26th December 1816: the feast of Santo Stefano, or St Stephen, and also the first day of the six-week long Venetian carnival. And so Byron finds ...all kinds of conceits and divertissements on every canal of this aquatic city... He spends the evening at the opera, at...

25th November 1816, and Byron is writing to his publisher in London, John Murray, to tell him how quickly he has settled into Venetian life, and how comfortable he is in Venice. For one thing, the city keeps the sort of late hours which suit him, ... the theatres are...

It is four o’clock on a cold, wet November afternoon, and Lord Byron is in Mestre, bad-tempered because of the weather and because he has just been offered a very poor dinner. He has spent the previous week trundling slowly across the nothern Italian plain from Milan,...

It is mid-October 1816, and Byron and Hobhouse are settled in lodgings in Milan. Their journey from Switzerland to Italy has been remarkably straightforward, since they have crossed the Alps via the Simplon Pass, a feat of engineering created at the command of...

It is September 29th 1816. Byron and Hobhouse have returned to Diodati from their ten-day tour of the Alps, a lengthy exploration in which they have travelled by a combination of open carriage, horseback and on foot. They have completed a circular tour which has taken...

Autumn - and Byron’s friend John Hobhouse – arrived in Geneva more or less simultaneously, bringing a blast of fresh air to Villa Diodati after many – maybe too many - evenings of ghost stories and metaphysical speculation. Hobhouse was the sort of Englishman who...