My first publication was a translation of Stendhal's
Memoirs of an Egotist
so that when my
book on Stendhal came out, I seemed to have come
full circle and ought perhaps to have given up; but it is hard to abandon the habit. I was unhappy that
my book on
Shakespeare's Practical Jokes, now out of print, was so narrowly focussed and have used it as the basis for a much more
general study of the comic in Shakespeare in which I am currently trying to interest an academic publisher. Meanwhile, I have secured
my more immediate future with a contract from Reaktion books for a biography of Lord Byron to be delivered by the end of next year.
This is in their 'Critical Lives' series and to be only 50,000 words long (2021). I look forward to the challenge of encompassing the life
and works of Byron in such a relatively limited space, and of trying to demonstrate that it is above all as one of English Literature's
great comic writers that he matters to us today.
