The Continental adventure was not going to plan for John Polidori. A young English doctor dreaming of literary acclaim and resentful of his father’s injunction to study medicine, he had accepted – against his father’s advice – a glamorous posting as travelling physician to the world’s most famous poet, only to find that proximity to fame brought not glory and greatness, but diminishment and disappointment. He felt, in his own words, “like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible”....
