If you think outrageous the doings of present-day pop stars and celebrities, cast an eye over this swashbuckling account of what David Crane in his introduction calls the "Gotterdammerung [sic] of English Romanticism" that began - or ended? - with the drowning of Shelley in the Gulf of Genoa in July 1822. The chronicler of this twilight of the gods, Edward Trelawny, is one of those figures a novelist would not dare to invent. He was born in London in 1792, the same year as Shelley, was put into the navy at the age of 13, and spent seven frustrated years as a midshipman, before being wounded in 1812. Thereafter he reinvented himself and his past, turning himself into a Byronic hero and adventurer. He fell in with the Shelley/Byron menage at Pisa, adoring the former and despising, though also emulating, the latter. He was the one who set light to Shelley's funeral pyre on the beach near Viareggio, and later would follow in Byron's fighting steps in Greece. Last Days is a wonderful yarn, the flavour of which will be enhanced by the occasional pinch of salt.