QI The Book of the Dead

himself into the world, shocking his fellow undergraduates at Cambridge by keeping a bear in his room, drinking burgundy from a human skull and consorting with choirboys. Immediately after college, he set off on a long, decadent European Grand Tour, which got as far as Turkey and during which he and his friends wrote, drank and slept with a large number of both boys and girls.
    The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage meant Byron returned in 1812 to find himself famous. Rather like the young Leonardo, he cultivated his new-found celebrity by making sure he looked the part, insisting on white linen trousers, which he would wear only once and order in batches of two dozen at a time. He also ordered silk handkerchiefs in batches of 100, even though, at 9 guineas, each set cost the annual salary of the average domestic servant at the time.
    The early poems created a new kind of hero, which we now call Byronic: moody, rebellious, smart, sophisticated and promiscuous, with a troubled past and a cynical view of life. Byron did his best to live up to it, although he wasn’t particularly tall, had a club foot that gave him a pronounced limp, and found it difficult to control his weight, frequently putting himself on starvation diets:
    I especially dread, in this world, two things, to which I have reason to believe I am equally predisposed – growing fat and growing mad .
     

    Despite this, Byron was irresistible to women. The archive of John Murray, his publisher, contains locks of hair posted to him from the heads and pubic regions of over a hundred women (including, most famously, Lady Caroline Lamb). Byron would sometimes reciprocate, although he was more likely to send a tuft cut from Boatswain, his Newfoundland dog. Lurking behind all his dealings with women is the feeling he didn’t like them much – as one wag put it: ‘He had to get off with women because he could not get on with them.’ The one exception was his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. They had an affair and eventually a child together, and it seems likely that he decided soon afterwards to get married to someone else in order to reduce the risk of scandal.
    This proved disastrous. For reasons that he was never able to explain properly, he decided to propose to Annabella Milbanke, the rather prim, maths-loving cousin of his former mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb. He claimed he was attracted to her because she didn’t dance (Byron couldn’t because of his deformed foot). The union was doomed from the start. He spent the journey to the church singing Albanian drinking songs, refused to kiss her during the service and later confessed he’d been fantasising about an old flame throughout the ceremony. They spent several weeks honeymooning at Seaham Hall, near Durham. The house was freezing cold and the only display of anything resembling affection Byron showed took place shortly after they’d arrived, when he roughly consummated the marriage on the drawing-room couch. Even the wedding cake was inedible: it had been baked a month earlier and had gone stale. Soon after the honeymoon, just to rub things in, the newly-weds visited Augusta. During their stay, Byron banned his new wife from the drawing room and only slept in the marital bed when Augusta’s period began. Morehumiliations followed, including his threatening her, while she was pregnant, with a loaded pistol. To no one’s great surprise, Annabella left him on grounds of mental cruelty a year later. The subsequent court case, with its rumours of marital violence, incest and sodomy, destroyed Byron’s social reputation and forced him into an exile on the Continent from which he never returned.

     
    One of the patterns that links the group of lives in this chapter is how few of them went on to have children of their own. Leonardo and Newton were gay; Heaviside died a virgin. Freud did have six children, despite disliking sex, but was only really close – arguably too close – to his youngest, Anna. It is interesting to speculate what Byron would have been like as a father. Against the odds, Annabella did bear him a daughter, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, generally known as Ada Lovelace (1815–52), but he saw her only once, fleetingly. Thereafter, her mother did everything she could to protect the girl from the legacy of her father’s memory.
    Annabella, after her divorce, became a cold and domineering control freak. She delegated the upbringing of her