Frances Wilson

Rebels With Causes

Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

By

Fourth Estate 604pp £25 order from our bookshop

‘I WANT A hero,’ writes Byron in the first canto of Don Juan: ‘an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one.. .’ Byron might have become a new one himself had he bled to death in Missolonghi because of battle wounds, rather than leeches. Aristocratic, appositional, misanthropic (and possessed of dash, immense energy, even greater confidence, and an image that lent itself to mass manipulation), he shares some of the heroic properties singled out by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in a book of whose irony and intelligence, lucidity and learning, and languorous, discursive quality the poet would have approved.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    Follow Us