Lord Byron (1788–1824) is among the UK’s greatest exports. Why, then, do so many treat him with embarrassed wariness? Perhaps we judge him for his shocking passions (not least with Augusta, his half-sister, and numerous women and men of the ton, the Grand Tour and the demi-monde) – or abhor his evident abusiveness. Perhaps it’s the extent of his work: thousands of pages of febrile, sometimes puerile rhyme. Or perhaps we simply fear that he is – as Wordsworth once declared – “insane”. In Greece,