George Gordon Byron was born with a club foot (his right), on 22 January 1788, just north of Oxford Street. His mother hailed from Scottish nobility. His father was a prodigal army captain, who died a few years later, in France, where he’d absconded with his wife’s inheritance. Byron’s mother moved to Aberdeen and raised her son with what remained. They lived in lodgings until a series of untimely accidents resulted in a Scottish grammar-school boy succeeding, at the age of ten, to the title of Baron Byron, and with it Newstead Abbey, a large estate in Nottinghamshire. As Lord Byron, author of Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he became an international celebrity. At twenty-eight he left England forever. He lived and travelled throughout Europe and the Levant, and died in 1824, aged 36, in Missolonghi, leading the Greeks in their War of Independence.