Throughout his professional life, the poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was variously celebrated and vilified for both his verse and his politics. Born in Dublin, he remained an ardent Irish patriot until his death. This eight-volume collection of Moore's memoirs, diaries and letters, edited by his friend Lord John Russell (1792-1878) and first published between 1853 and 1856, provides rare insights into a man whose genius was applauded by the Morning Chronicle as 'embracing almost all sides of imaginative literature, of criticism and philosophy'. Volume 6 contains Moore's diary for the period 1829-33, during which time he finally published Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830) and the book that won him respect as a leading Irish patriot, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831).