 | | | THE LATEST PROGRAMME | | | |
| | Jonathan Freedland looks for the past behind the present. Each week, The Long View, recorded on location throughout the British Isles, takes an issue from the current affairs agenda and finds a parallel in our past.
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Max Clifford, publicist, and Lord Byron, an early self-publicist. |  Sources used for readings in the programme
On the 10 March 1812 a little know poet without much expectation of success published his second book, a collection of traveller's poems. Five days later every copy had sold. "I awoke," wrote George Gordon, Lord Byron, in his diaries, "and I was famous."
This week's Long View tells the story of Byron's overnight success and the extraordinary impression he made on his contemporaries in a few years of dazzling celebrity. His poetic genius certainly impresses academics to this day, but in the early years of the nineteenth century Byron was a poet, a star, a fashion icon, a celebrity in every sense.
| | | On Location | |   | | Left-hand picture:Portrait of Lord Byron at John Murray's, Byron's publisher. The portrait hangs above the fire place where his memoirs were burnt.
Right-hand picture: Adrian Dunbar and Jonathan Freedland
| |   | | Left-hand picture:Jonathan Freedland and Max Clifford
Right-hand picture: Dover House, now the Scotland Office, where Lady Caroline Lamb lived. Byron was a frequent visitor ...
| | In the space of a few days he went from obscurity to the centre of high society, invited to parties everywhere, pursued by women determined to get close to the sexiest and most exciting man in Britain.
He soon started the first of many affairs which of course created an aftermath of gossip and scandal, giving rise to allegations of every kind of excess... In fact the scandals eventually proved too much and Byron went into an exile from which he was never to return.
Contributors
Max Clifford
Chris Kenyon-Jones of King's College, University of London,
Adrian Dunbar, movie star
Jenny Eclair, comedienne
Chris Rojek, author of 'Celebrity',
and Charles Gant, film editor of Heat Magazine.
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Listen to - Introduction
