This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industr

This book examines the relationship between Lord Byron's life and work, and the Regency culture of scandal.

Argues that Byron’s popularity marked the beginning of celebrity as a cultural identity.

"How long it’s taken for these two mad, bad and dangerous writers to get together!" —Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed biographer of James Joyc

One was the mother who bore him; three were women who adored him; one was the sister he slept with; one was his abused and sodomized wife; one was his legitimat