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“... the other a paladin who combines the wealth of Croesus, the wisdom of Solomon and the beauty of Byron. But their glamour is pallid beside the turpitude of Dickens’s Nickleby, Dombey and Merdle, or Trollope’s Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange ...”

“... to detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based ...”

“... found it hard to change his mind. In Seven Types he remarked that it was only in Don Juan that Byron escaped from his infantile incest-fixation on his half-sister, ‘which was till then all he had got to say’. Later he added a note to say he now understood that Byron did not meet Augusta till he was grown up (till he ...”

“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele Bernstein, Richard ...”

“... the natural prey of the rowing club but avoided having his sheets shredded when his friend Robert Byron repelled the would-be invaders, who ‘fell like nine pins before a barrage of champagne bottles flung … from a strategic position at the head of the stairs with a force and precision that radically changed the pattern of Oxford rowing for the rest of the ...”

“... to Canada after the heiress debacle; ambitiously, Claire Clairmont, the glamorous young mother of Byron’s daughter, who liked Peacock but thought him feckless and idle. His oddest courtship was aimed at Jane Gryffydh, to whom he abruptly proposed by letter in 1819 after failing to make contact at all over the previous eight years. The marriage took place in ...”

“... to the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March ...”

“... person already establishes in the public’s mind some relations between wild and tame: with Byron, for instance, or D. H. Lawrence, we are prepared to accept the wild elements as an important part of the picture. With Jane Austen, the public is much less eager or even inclined to imagine ‘wild’ elements. Yet Austen has her ‘wild’ side, and there ...”

“... tour de force Balzac invokes Cuvier, the ‘greatest poet of the century’ – greater even than Byron. The palaeontologist’s conception of the past has the effect of making us ‘lose our footing in the present’. Again and again in 19th-century literature we are reminded of the vertiginous prospects opened up behind, beneath and before us by students of ...”

“... the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At his public execution William Cobbett, looking out from his cell window (he was in for political libel), ‘saw the half-horrified countenances’ of the crowd, the ‘mournful tears’ running down their faces and ‘heard the unanimous blessings’. He ascribed this to their ...”

“... of Tyerman’s unsentimental look at the careers of 28 Harrow Heads, from the first incumbent, William Launce, who took up office at what was then called the Harrow Free Grammar School in 1615, with the vicar’s son as his first pupil, to Ian Beer, the last Head but one, who retired in 1991. A few emerge as hopelessly inadequate to the task of running a ...”

“... coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier ...”

“... line. As usual, Dryden was repeating what others had said in Oldham’s lifetime, including Sir William Soame, a poetical gentleman now chiefly remembered perhaps for having translated Boileau’s Art Poétique with Dryden’s help. Oldham was sensitive on the point, answered Soame in the ‘Advertisement’ to Some New Pieces (1681) and set about refuting ...”