Byron: Life and Legend, by Fiona MacCarthy (Faber, £9.99)
MacCarthy is the Flora Poste of biography, as Starkadder madness and badness don't impress her. Byron poses in history's doorway, a presence of predatory danger; she says "Do come in, sit down and tell me all about it, you poor thing" - and he does, though he can't con her or embarrass her.
She is calmly hard on the old monster - his self-pity is exposed, likewise his inability, until almost the end, to take responsibility for the hit-and-run accidents of his emotional life. She reconstructs the actual texture of his days, which seem to have been comic or surreal rather than, as he would have had posterity believe, toy-theatre melodramatic. Byron seduces, abuses, decamps, even abandons his cucumber diet and gets fat on pasta - yet MacCarthy keeps faith with him, and gives him the unqualified love his core honesty deserves, as when she notes his understanding of the moral weight of trivialities. Beyond the urn, he's found his last wise lady patron in her.
Wilfred Owen, by Dominic Hibberd (Phoenix, £8.99)
I fretted as Hibberd closely tracks Owen from terraced house to semi-detached through a stunted childhood of penurious respectability and evangelical uplift. Owen is poor, furiously keen, a Keats geek, his awful mother's precious boy: a pain, although the pitiful class nuances of his era are hardly his fault. And then, a mere interlude later, 2nd Lieut Owen lands in France - "into the real thing, Mud" - and Hibberd follows just as closely through the massy logistics and messy confusion of the Somme.
At this point, the intimacy of his technique pays off. Each local section of a first world war salient, as experienced by soldiers, was, after all, no longer than the Birkenhead streets where Owen grew up. Hibberd details Owen's shellshock and its treatment, and the poetry that Owen made of his own, and the world's, nightmares, with the same even and scrupled exactness he brings to the childhood - for in so short but full a life, they must have had equal weight.
