Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron - Tom Holland

I am a bit of a fan of vampire stories so when my daughter gave me a box of books I was thrilled to see The Vampyre by Tom Holland in amongst them. I was in between books so started reading it straight away and what an amazing novel it turned out to be, one of those rare books which you physically cannot put down for hours on end because the story has you so engrossed. The Vampyre is a novel which merges fact with fantasy to create an alternate existence for one of England's greatest poets, Lord Byron. While travelling through Greece, Byron and his friend Hobhouse come across an enigmatic nobleman who obviously rules with an iron will and has a strange ...  Read the complete review

Vampires have got to be the greatest fictional monster ever. Supremely powerful and vulnerable they represent something repellant yet inexplicably tantalising. It is largely for this reason that they came to be used as a symbol in modernist writing. Bram Stoker, for many considered the father of modernism, is perhaps the most famous proponent of the vampire, having created the Dracula myth as we largely know it today. And it certainly has its origins in the gothic writings of the 1800s. But he was not the only one to see it as a great plot device and vampires crop up again and again in literature and artwork throughout the early decades of the 20th ...  Read the complete review