George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was the first literary megastar - a poet who, for a few years after the fall of Napoleon, was the most famous man in the western world. He dominated literary Europe, where he was seen as the prophet and champion of liberty, though ironically he was known only through prose translations of his poems. After his death, young poets and artists throughout Europe idolised Byron, becoming oppositional, self-assertive, freedom-loving, and opposed to conventional sexual morality. In England, his poetry led to a public obsession with his scandalous private life, with its succession of public affairs with married women, and rumours of dark sexual secrets.

As a boy Byron was subjected to a series of painful but useless treatments for the club foot with which he had been born. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he had crushes on fellow boys, though his gay encounters always tended to be when there were no women around, or in countries like Greece where homosexuality was regarded as perfectly acceptable.

His first poems, Hours of Idleness (1807) were generally well received, but one very hostile review upset him: "...it knocked me down - but I got up again. Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer." This was a satire attacking his critics, and the poetry of most contemporaries, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published in 1809. After a tour of the Mediterranean he returned to England in 1811, and in 1812 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published. It sold out in three days, and Byron remarked, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." The sensation created by this poem is hard to understand today, when its style appears overblown and often absurd and affected. The attraction was the hero Harold, the Byronic hero: a gloomy, passionate, misanthropic type who stands aloof, moodily and cynically observing the follies of the world, and doomed by some dark but unspecified "crime" to be cut off forever from the one woman he loves. Byron insisted "I would not be such a fellow as I made my hero for all the world," but his female readers saw only the poet, who though jaded with "concubines and carnal company", might yet be saved by a good woman. He was besieged, the road outside his apartments jammed with coaches bringing invitations from aristocratic hostesses, and women of all classes virtually queuing up for the opportunity to try some salvation on him.

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