Critical Mash is moving on from the femme fatale to her scarcely less dramatic cousin, the homme fatale. Robert Thicknesse is joined this week by Sian Edwards, head of conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, and poet, playwright, and librettist Glyn Maxwell, as they delve into the pouting depths of the souls of brooding Byronic heroes. Their journey into the romantic wilds sees them explore connections between Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and Pushkin’s verse novel, both influenced by the Byronic hero, and traces the trope’s impact through Russian literature, highlighting works by Lermontov and Turgenev.