Titans of History полностью

Thereafter, until the second half of the 19th century, the British made no concerted effort to confront the Zulus. Indeed, government policy was to safeguard the integrity of the Zulu empire from Boer expansionism. All this changed, however, in January 1879 when, to placate the Akrikaners after the annexation of the Transvaal two years earlier, the British instigated the Zulu War, aiming to seize Zululand as an area ripe for Afrikaner settlement. They ordered the Zulu king Cetshwayo—Mpande’s son—to disband his army within thirty days; when he failed to comply, hostilities began.

By September 1879, Cetshwayo had been captured and the territory brought under British control (though not before the British had suffered a famous defeat at the Battle of Isandhlwana and been pinned down at the siege of Rorke’s Drift—an incident forever commemorated in the 1964 film Zulu). Though unrest continued in the years that followed, prospects for an independent Zulu homeland had suffered fatal damage. In 1887, Zululand was formally annexed to the crown—a move that signaled the permanent dissolution of the Zulu empire.

BYRON

1788–1824

A variety of powers almost boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them,—a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius, and an uncontrolled impetuosity in yielding to them …

Byron, as described by his friend and biographer Thomas Moore in his Life of Lord Byron (1835)

Lord Byron, the dashing, brooding poet, was the quintessence of the romantic hero. Women lost themselves trying to save him; society looked on in fascinated outrage as the aristocratic outsider defied their conventions. Shadowed by a permanent aura of depravity, irresistible in his vulnerability, mocking, witty, flamboyant and bold, Byron gave birth to a new image of the hero. Yet it is the incandescent, exuberant genius of the poetry that makes him immortal

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was, as he wrote in his unfinished masterpiece Don Juan, “the Grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.” The poet who could dash off sixty to eighty stanzas after a hearty dinner hit the English literary landscape like a hurricane. When the first two cantos of his Childe Harold were published in 1812, they sold out immediately. “I awoke one morning,” noted the twenty-year-old poet, “and found myself famous.”

Byron was the poster boy of the Romantic generation. The melancholic disillusionment of Childe Harold and the mordant, mocking irony of Don Juan satirized the hypocrisies and pretensions of society and mourned the failure of reality to live up to lofty ideals. Driven forward in searing, pounding rhythms, Byron’s poetry embodied the spirit of the age:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me,

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture

Everyone assumed that Byron was the lost and disenchanted eponymous hero of Childe Harold, restlessly wandering across the continent. The poet’s history was indeed romantic enough. Son of the profligate, charming Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron, the boy was brought up in penury in Aberdeen by his widowed mother until the death of his great-uncle transformed his fortunes. Brought back to England, the wild, club-footed ten-year-old inherited the magnificent ruins of Newstead Abbey and the title of Lord Byron.

Sitting in a corner, staring moodily into space, the slight, pale, beautiful Byron was a magnet for society’s women. “He is really the only topic almost of every conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other,” commented the political hostess Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. With his innumerable conquests, Byron cut a swathe through society—from Lady Caroline Lamb, who was so mad about the poet that when he was attending a party to which she was not invited, she would wait outside in the street for him, to Lady Oxford, the middle-aged hostess who encouraged her young lover’s radicalism.