Life Lessons from Byron

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Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Born in 1798, he was celebrated as much for his scandalous private life as for his enduring poetry. A prolific writer, he is famous for his long narrative poetical works and remains one of the most influential contributors to literature. Here you will find extracts from his greatest works. The Life Lessons series from The School of Life takes a great thinker and highlights those ideas most relevant to ordinary everyday dilemmas. These books emphasise ways in which wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us. This book is introduced and edited by Matthew Bevis, lecturer and English fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and the author of The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Tennyson, Joyce.

Reviews

A new series of books from Alain de Botton's School of Life does for Hobbes, Freud, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Byron and Bergson what de Botton's books have done for classical philosophers and Proust. They are short, snappy reads, reminiscent of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog - aphoristic digests from history's great minds * New Statesman *
thoroughly welcoming and approachable ... [Life Lessons from Byron is] a ringing affirmation of the power of poetry to reach down tot the essence, or at least the essences, of life ... If the six books in the Life Lessons series can teach even a few readers to pay passionate heed to the world - to notice things - they will have been an unquestionable success -- John Banville * Prospect *
The book is written out of this sense of intimacy with Byron which never seems forced or mannered. I get the impression that Dr Bevis must be an excellent teacher ... What I liked about this little book, and I liked it a lot, is that it treats Byron as a grown-up - and Byron was very much a grown-up (amongst other things of course). Bevis moves naturally from letters and journals to the poems and to comments by those who knew Byron well. I often read things written about Byron and do not recognise Byron in them, but here, all the time, is the presence of a thinking, feeling, sensitive, witty, modest, very odd, but always vital man who engages his readers with unusual directness and is always, as he claimed, essentially a moral poet ... I wish someone would give this book to Melvyn Bragg or Rupert Everett or even Fiona McCarthy. They would learn a thing or two from it about Byron. But any reader, new to Byron, or familiar with him would enjoy this superb little volume -- Professor Bernard Beatty * The Byron Journal *
there is a good deal to be learned from these little primers * Observer *

Author Bio

Dr Matthew Bevis is an English lecturer at Keble College, Oxford University. His current research is mainly in literature from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. He is the general co-editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock and is currently writing a book on Wordsworth at Play.