When Percy Bysshe Shelley’s body was cremated on an Italian beach, his friend Edward Trelawny reached into the fire and pulled out his heart, which had refused to burn. The organ was kept by Shelley’s wife Mary for the rest of her life. It was the kind of Gothic detail that Shelley himself would have appreciated.

This episode traces the radical poet from his expulsion from Oxford for atheism through elopements, political exile, revolutionary pamphlets, and the boating accident that killed him at twenty-nine.

• He was expelled from Oxford for co-authoring a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism
• His heart survived cremation and was kept by his wife Mary Shelley until her death
• He eloped twice, and his first wife drowned herself after he left her
• He wrote Ozymandias, one of the most anthologized poems in the English language