As modern popular opinion returns to something like its old disapproving view of Lord Byron, a book which situates him in the dynasty of which he was a part (albeit initially a fairly marginal one) and reminds us that compared to his family, he really wasn't that bad. Spendthrift, fuckboy and occasional whiner he might have been, but dear heavens, at least he was interesting about it, whereas plenty of them just read like lazy sketches of dislikeable aristocrats, fit only to serve as antagonists in broad-brush historical dramas. In particular, Byron's predecessor to the title, William, 5th Baron Byron, looms at the heart of this book like an especially disagreeable toad – killing a friend in suspicious circumstances while young, squandering his inheritance, selling off the family silver (and anything else), chiselling money wherever he can, even at one stage damming the river that runs through Newstead's grounds, in order that he might extort huge fees from those downstream for the privilege of his visiting neither drought nor flood on them. And then, when it was pointed out in the courts that even 18th century aristocrats couldn't take the piss quite that much, the very picture of outraged entitlement at this unforgivable intrusion on his perceived rights! Not that he was any better in his youth, having always been pushy and arrogant when he thought he was in the stronger position, and a snivelling coward the minute anyone pushed back - whether that be an intended 'romantic' conquest, or the Jacobites. Rackety in youth, miserly in old age, Brand gamely attempts to elicit some sympathy for the old bastard, but it's a losing battle. Although Doctor Who fans will be particularly interested in William's wife, Elizabeth Shaw - a possible alternative fate for her? And, while fairly ghastly, no worse than she normally seems to suffer in the spin-offs, poor woman.

It's clearly William's generation who most caught Brand's attention; the beastly Baron himself, his naval brother John, their romantic sister Isabella, and the other two. I suspect this may be at least in part down to the richness of the archival material for that period, and she has dug into the primary sources for it; earlier generations, on the other hand, are a little prone to getting lost in a thicket of 'might' and 'perhaps', and too much being inferred from comparison with a family of similar station when the whole reason we're reading the book is the particularity of this clan. Still, once she gets on to her stars, and to a slightly lesser extent their children (the generation including the poet's parents), the book comes alive. For all its research, it still dallies with the novelistic school of history/biography, and I'm sure the italicised passages of presumed interiority in particular will make some purists' skin crawl. Still, fuck it - history is always telling stories to some extent, and there are benefits to being blatant about that. If anything, my main problem is the stories missed along the way; compared to the last literary biography I read, Eleanor Fitzsimons on Nesbit, there's a sad lack of introductions to other characters of note whose paths cross the Byrons'. Sure, we probably don't need an explanation of Samuel Johnson, and even Charles James Fox you can maybe get away with just dropping in, but it seems a shame not to tell readers more about the now largely forgotten figures of the age, for example George Selwyn. He was a close friend of Isabella's son Frederick, and there are several quotes from their correspondence, but if you didn't know the period you'd assume that was about it, and have him down as a fairly generic gentleman and inactive MP, when in fact he was a spectacularly weird figure even by the standards of the time, dogged by (oddly fond, at least sometimes) rumours of necrophilia.

If there's any kind of hero in the book it's probably John, one of the figures here who'd merit the occasional biography even if he hadn't ended up with a more famous descendant. A sailor, he would rise to the rank of Vice-Admiral and command British forces in America's war of independence; on earlier missions, he'd established Britain's claim to the Falklands (the only other inhabitants at the time, it should be noted, were French – no indigenous people; no Argentinians, because they didn't exist yet; not even any Spaniards), completed what was at the time the fastest circumnavigation of the globe, and paved the way (if that's not an entirely inappropriate metaphor at sea) for the subsequent voyages of Captain Cook. Compared to most of the Byrons, he was also reasonably good at not being an utter swine to his spouse (even if, among various other infidelities, she did walk in on him screwing the teenage chambermaid) or spending way beyond his means (even if he still ended up having to sell his Grosvenor Square house to cover various debts – and worse, seeing it taken by his old foe John Adams, who would make it the first US embassy in Britain). He was also, alas, spectacularly unlucky. His first big naval trip turned into an epic tale of shipwreck, mutiny and woe, the account of which is filled with sentences like this: "Their first meal for two days was a miserable soup cobbled together from wild celery, a seagull and a bag of 'biscuit dust' which turned out to have been mixed with tobacco and prompted violent retching." Even speaking as a spectacularly fussy eater who once faced Sushisamba's attempt at a vegetarian tasting menu, this sounds like a contender for the worst meal ever, and it's by no means the end of their sorrows. Bodies start turning up, people start going mad, shoes get eaten. John meets and befriends a feral dog, which helps him hunt, but then also gets eaten. When the few survivors finally make it back to Britain, there's a strangely polite court martial which concludes that on the whole it couldn't be helped and doesn't dish out anything worse than a slap on the wrist to one ensign. And after all that, oblivious either to good sense or irony, he's given command of a ship called HMS Vulture!

The worst of it is, that's not even the trip that earned him the sobriquet 'Foul-Weather Jack'. Plenty more nautical nonsense lies ahead – sailors trading their spare shirts for monkeys, the lot. One is left with the impression of a decent-ish fellow with whom you'd nonetheless be reluctant even to go for a walk down the road to the pub, because it would somehow end up with you tumbling into a distant volcano. On top of which, it's an unfortunate alias because as is so often the way with aristocratic families (or indeed, just inefficient families), certain names recur; John's son was also John, but is referred to throughout the book as Jack. He's the one who fathered the poet, and while it might be considered prejudicial, it could also have been clearer to have him as 'Mad Jack' for avoidance of confusion. Lords know, it's not like the ghastly little prick doesn't deserve it, crowing about his own irresistibility and then kicking the maid downstairs at Christmas.

And then you have poor Isabella. In some ways she does very well for herself, marrying up into the Howards (of 'home used for eighties Brideshead' fame, but also one of England's great families in general). She rather takes to domestic life, too, amassing a considerable brood, not to mention a collection of helpful home remedies about as appetising as John's soup – viper broth for fever, anyone? Alas, as will tend to happen when you marry someone a lot older, he doesn't last long, leaving her young son Frederick as Earl of Carlisle (he will go on to be our chief negotiator with the rebellious American colonies, and be challenged to a duel by Lafayette). Isabella, still pretty young by our standards (and not that old even by her time's), likewise becomes Dowager Countess, a station not generally thought to be compatible with staying out dancing and flirting until four in the morning. This could easily be a story of a fun, unconventional woman brought low by sexist times, and to some extent it is, but dear heavens she has terrible taste in men, taking up with a succession of unsuitable types from quiet homebodies to grasping faux-noblemen, and always so softhearted that she keeps funnelling money she doesn't have to various of her impecunious relations, all of whom can then be guaranteed to spend it on something unsuitable before the week is out. In the end, she presents at once a tragic and bathetic figure, neatly summarised by Brand: "She had always been ready to forgive, especially where affairs of the heart were concerned – her downfall had been that she expected the same favour from others."

Running through all this, though, are the details which to us necessarily feel like they prefigure the family's most famous son. Isabella dallies with someone who ends up marrying one of her daughters, round about the same time as William's son breaks an engagement to marry one of John's daughters. As if that weren't sufficient incest theme to set it up, some of Mad Jack's letters to his sister Fanny (and no, the name doesn't help) are tough not to read extremely suspiciously. Nor do they restrain themselves to this line of debauchery; the whole pack (with the possible exception of Reverend Richard, one of the two less exciting siblings who don't feature much) seem to be massive shaggers in general; granted, this was not unusual for men of there age and station, but the women are at it too, not least Isabella's daughter Betty, who at 46 married a naval captain half her age - and who was her daughter-in-law's brother, at that. About the only innovation the most famous Byron seems to have introduced was going for his own sex too. Similarly, he wasn't the family's first writer; several of them wrote bits of poetry, and published works included John's account of his voyages, and Isabella's maxims for young ladies (the latter generally reviewed with an understandable raised eyebrow, as commendable theory she had not herself necessarily manifested in practice). Would any of them be much read now? Well, maybe not, but then how much is Byron actually read compared to how often he's used as shorthand? One of the ahistorical biases which always irks me is the reflex mockery of any creative stirrings by the child of a famous parent. Now, granted, in a world which offers Adam Cohen and Nikolai Tolstoy, the temptation makes sense, and I was as happy as anyone to rip the piss when Bono's son's band was tipped as one to watch in 2020. But equally we should remember how many figures who now seem to stand alone as blazing figures in history were themselves children of the famous when they began, and only subsequently came to eclipse their forebears. Wilde's one classic example, and really Byron is another – it's just that by any standard Byron's inheritance was an especially mixed one. "Some curse hangs over me and mine," he wrote, like the big old goth he was – but he was by no means the first of the line even to suspect that. "There is some Misfortune cast on our family," said Jack; Isabella, that "There is a Planet overrules sone Familys & blasts every Prospect". One might legitimately object that all three of these witnesses were, to use the technical term, messy bitches who live for the drama, but at one point even the more stoical Doctor Johnson suggested "Fiction durst not have driven upon a few months such a conflux of misery", and Foul-Weather Jack was held in Francophone Canada to have become a sort of Flying Dutchman as punishment for his burning of villages in a 1760 conflict. Meaning that by the end, the Poe resonances of the title don't seem entirely unfair – even if there is a certain sleight of hand at work. Because after the poet, himself more an implicit figure here than someone followed in any great detail (there are, after all, plenty of other biographies for that), the title would survive, and pass to another of the more respectable-ish Byrons, after the model of John – another seafaring hero, George Anson Byron. About whom I can only ever picture Byron himself bitterly singing the Undertones' 'My Perfect Cousin'.

(Netgalley ARC)

This is a carefully researched and well written account of three generations of a family with little but themselves to blame for their tragedies. The context of the time is well drawn too. The trouble is that the Byron family is neither well known nor of particular significance so the book is unlikely to be a popular read. A similar book about a more important and influential family would be attractive.

I found this book to be at many points too much of a good thing. There is so much information to relay and the author is obviously so passionate that the text becomes overwhelming. I understand the desire to both set the scene and also make use of what must have been staggering amounts of references but, for example in early chapters the reader is pummelled with superfluous names, so much that it becomes a difficult task keeping up with the ones that actually matter. On top of this I felt the text so choked with parentheses and quotations that it was distracting. They are a natural pause point so interrupt the momentum and when so overused did seem to ruin what could have been a more elegant flow. But the book is not the sum of these parts and after persevering I certainly learned more than I ever knew about previous generations in the Byron line, plus a bit about the infamous Lord himself. As my final book of 2019 I'm happy that it was a good one.

It started off quite well but soon launched into a confusing jumble of events, names and marriages, interspersed with quotes, and jumping forward and backwards in time. If the author had taken a more novelistic approach it would have been more interesting. As it was, I skimmed much of it, to find it did not say much about Lord Byron the poet's life and death at all!

Overall I found this to be an enjoyable book where the author depicts a completely insane family who weathers (to name just a few) accusations of murder, a sibling lost at sea for many years, a Countess with numerous flirtations and a ‘cougar marriage’ (marrying a much younger man) and later incest. Prior to reading this book I had very little knowledge about the Byron family and found that I enjoyed learning and understanding their place within English history. My own criticisms would be a lack of genogram; there was a lot of similar names that at times I felt confused as to who the author was referring to. I also would like the epilogue to focus more on the 6th Lord Byron and the future as opposed to devoting pages summarising past events. However these criticisms aside I enjoyed this book and would recommend to anyone who may have an interest in this period or with Lord Byron.

Thank you to Netgalley and John Murray Press for providing an e-copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The Fall of the House of Byron is a portrait of the lives of the Byron family in the eighteenth century, leading up to the point at which the famous poet inherits the title Lord Byron at the age of ten. From the 4th Baron Byron William at Newstead Abbey at the start of the century to his son William, the 'Wicked Lord', dying at the end of it, the book follows marriage, scandal, murder, and war through generations of siblings and cousins as the Byrons lose reputation and money amidst the backdrop of the events of the century.

The cover and title of the book set it up as a different way of looking at Lord Byron, venturing deep into the lives of his ancestors and using him only as a framing device and focus point. Due to this, the book gets most interesting when focusing on the figures you know are going to be important in relation to the poet—particularly his father Jack—and in the inevitability of who has to die for him to end up inheriting the title. The book seems comprehensive and provides insight into interpersonal relationships and scandal in the Georgian period, but particularly near the start (when there's less scandal) it can feel a bit like a lot of facts about when people are born or marry.

Perhaps less scandalous than could be expected for anyone who has read about Byron himself, this is a detailed account of how a family fell in various ways across a century. Though not a surprise to those interested in Byron (who are presumably the target audience of the book), it shows that he didn't just come from a straightforward aristocratic family, but one full of the scandal he was known for and who didn't have the money or reputation they once had.

Brand has found a new angle on the oft-written about Byron: she explores his ancestors in this book and finds them equally 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'. This starts with young George arriving at Newstead Abbey before flipping back. Now that so much has been written about Byron himself, his wife and daughter, this is a good way of getting an oblique Byron fix which learning something new.

Holding off on posting the full review until closer to publication but this was an intelligent, engaging and balanced look at one of the most infamous 19th C poets. Recommended for those interested in poetry or the history of literature and its players.