The executors’ destruction of Sodom echoed another act that took place less than a decade earlier, and that has been described as the greatest literary crime in history: the burning of the personal memoirs of the poet and libertine Lord Byron. Soon after Byron’s death in 1824, three men disposed of the manuscript: the publisher John Murray; the poet Thomas Moore; and Byron’s longtime companion, John Cam Hobhouse. Along with lawyers representing Byron’s married half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his widow, Anne Isabella, these men decided the manuscript would ruin Byron’s reputation, it was that
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