What is comedy? Andrew Stott tackles this question through an investigation of comic forms, theories and techniques, tracing the historical definitions of comedy from Aristotle to Chris Morris's Brass Eye via Wilde and Hancock. Rather than attempting to produce a totalising definition of 'the comic'[...]

In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his generation and the most famous man in Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing his celebrity, notoriety and debts, he sought refuge in Europe, taking his young doctor with him. As an inexperienced medic with literary as[...]