g44

 John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830 , just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money. Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might...

 Consider these elements. A young, rich and gifted man is obsessed with revolutionary idealism. He attends prestigious schools and the most prestigious university but is expelled from the latter because of his outrageous outspoken views, opinions he chose to publish in pamphlets . He is disowned by his family, runs away with his girlfriend, gets into drugs and devote his time to writing poetry that no one else professes to understand. He gets bored with his wife, has a fling with a teenager and sets off with her to travel, apparently none too troubled by leaving his wife and children to their own devices. Soon afterwards, his estranged wife kills herself. He takes more drugs, regularly, wanders around on his travels with his new wife, gets in with a heavy crowd of fellow travellers, falls foul of authority and does stupid things. He continues to write, but generally has to publish his work at his own expense, because others still find it baffling. He seems to be obsessed with a p...