Dr. Kate Lister

So that's kind of kicking around this fact.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's all a bit like that.

But it was more his mother who was an aristocrat, sort of low-level aristocrat from Scotland.

That's where their peerage came from.

So it's really the aristocratic bit comes more from his mother.

His grandfather, paternal grandfather, was...

I don't want to say naval person, but he was famous for being shipwrecked a lot.

He was known as Bad Weather Byron.

He was shipwrecked, and there's a story about how he had to eat his dog's paws after they'd been buried for several weeks.

It's a whole thing.

But Byron grows up with stories of these legends around him, and they have quite a profound impact on him.

Endless scrapes with death, addiction issues, mental health issues, terrible womanising, a spot of incest thrown in.

There's some speculation about whether or not our Byron's dad actually took his own life or whether it was all a terrible accident.

But by the time he dies, he's living in Peignery, and I think it was France, because he had to flee his creditors.

Yeah, it's all a mess.

That's where you picked up from that, dying in France.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

Byron is born one year before the French Revolution kicks off.

And he's very much a child of the revolution, of these new ideas that are sweeping the world, that maybe we could do things differently.