High above the 'Dancing Floor of Ares' on the remote northern slopes of Parnassus lies one of the most improbable and dangerous of all literary monuments - the cave of Edward John Trelawny - writer, adventurer, fantasist and chronicler of the Romantic circle of Shelley and Byron. It was in this mountain fortress that he lived out his Byronic fantasies during the Greek War of Independence as the companion of the bandit chief Odysseus; it was here he married his thirteen-year-old bride; it was here that he was shot twice in the back by two English assassins; and from here that he was eventually rescued in August 1825 by a retired English officer called Francis D'Arcy Bacon.David Crane's book draws on a wealth of archival material in Britain and Greece, and on contemporary diaries and memoirs, to describe how the impoverished younger son of an old Cornish family invented a romantic personality for himself, bluffed and charmed his way into the Pisan circle and turned himself into a celebrity and mouthpiece for both Shelley and Byron.It is a biography of one of the most compellingly eccentric figures of English literature and an adventure story where the boundaries between fantasy and reality were blurred with often fatal consequences. Read Less