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Diary

C.J. Walker: In Erevan, 6 July 1989

... them, or it. As aid workers they seemed absent. The school, incidentally, is to be called the Lord Byron: an imaginative touch, recalling Byron’s struggles with the Armenian language in Venice in 1815, and perhaps beyond that, his fight against Ottoman tyranny, something with which the Armenians came to grips only when ...

At Free Love Corner

Jenny Diski, 30 March 2000

Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers 
by Frances Wilson.
Faber, 258 pp., £12.99, October 1999, 0 571 19288 2
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... in literature would know already. In an initial compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all ...

Sacred Monster

Graham Hough, 20 August 1981

Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn among Lions 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Weidenfeld, 391 pp., £9.95, July 1981, 0 297 77801 3
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... Writers of indubitable greatness have been distorted by their legend, like Dr Johnson and Byron. Those of less certain status, like Oscar Wilde, have been left by it in a sort of limbo, where we never know what it is we are being asked to admire, their life-style or their art. Edith Sitwell comes in this class, and Victoria Glendinning’s biography ...

Post-Cullodenism

Robert Crawford, 3 October 1996

The Poems of Ossian and Related Works 
by James Macpherson, edited by Howard Gaskill.
Edinburgh, 573 pp., £16.95, January 1996, 0 7486 0707 2
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... in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this ...

Erratic Star

Michael Foot, 11 May 1995

Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle 
by Simon Heffer.
Orion, 420 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 297 81564 4
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... had carried the reputation of English literature across the continent of Europe, Swift, Milton and Byron. Grierson had a special title to speak about Scotland. Another lecture, on ‘Scott and Carlyle’, begins: ‘The lives of the three greatest of Scottish imaginative writers – Burns, Scott and Carlyle – overlapped in an interesting and, for each ...

Phew!

E.S. Turner, 11 June 1992

Sunny Intervals and Showers: Our Changing Weather 
by David Benedictus.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £14.99, April 1992, 0 297 81154 1
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... priapism, as that Sun headline would suggest. (Yes, in this context Mr Benedictus dutifully quotes Byron, ‘What men call gallantry, and the gods adultery,/Is much more common where the climate’s sultry,’ but this is one of several hares he starts but does not dispatch.)So to more serious matters, like weather forecasting. The book contains a prodigiously ...

At the Royal Academy

Eleanor Birne: Tacita Dean, 7 June 2018

... catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the special orthopaedic shoe he wore). Shortly before she left the Slade, Dean too started limping: the first sign (‘as if my mind knew back then ahead of my ...

At Piano Nobile

John-Paul Stonard: On R.B. Kitaj, 14 December 2023

... is the Most Feigning’ to Edgar Wind. Kitaj borrowed a line from Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ for the title of the Arts Council exhibition he selected in 1976 – The Human Clay – though it was Hockney’s love of the phrase that drew it first to Kitaj’s attention.Kitaj discovered Walter Benjamin through reading an essay by Gershom ...

Cutting it short

John Bayley, 3 November 1983

Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny, translated by Walter Arndt.
Stanford, 545 pp., $38.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1142 9
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The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny.
Stanford, 386 pp., $32.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1143 7
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... mysterious job and that it was not for him to press it further. Don Juan comes to an end because Byron cannot keep up the pressure and think up further adventures to which his imagination can really respond, and so he loses interest. Evgeny Onegin does not end in this sense at all. In it Pushkin tells us that when he began what he calls his ‘free ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard ...

You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
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... a note praising the satire’s bold manoeuvres under the ‘Argus Eye’ of the authorities. For Byron in the early 1820s, no radical publications of recent years could match the virulence and courage of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743): ‘had he lived now he would have been denounced … as the grand Mouth-piece and Factionary of the ...

Diary

Benjamin Markovits: Michael Jordan and Me, 23 May 2002

... Half Price Books, which in my childhood lived up to its name. Both obsessions had their heroes: Byron among the Romantics – principally, I think, for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but ...

Biting into a Pin-cushion

A.D. Nuttall: Descartes’s botch, 24 June 2004

Flesh in the Age of Reason 
by Roy Porter.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 7139 9149 6
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... Locke, Swift, Mandeville, Hume, Gibbon, Erasmus Darwin, Hartley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Byron, Coleridge and many, many more are vigorously characterised and placed in an intelligible narrative. Schama is right to say that the author’s death is the more shocking because the book is so exuberantly vital; Porter was at the height of his powers. One ...

Discovering America

Tatyana Tolstaya, 1 June 1989

... there to look at the outstanding, unbelievably golden and moving sunset slowly sink into the sea. Byron climbed up there too, and even scratched his name on one of the columns – an example which has been followed by less eminent vandals. As evening approaches and the sun sinks lower, the excitement grows, the crowd becomes denser, people crane their ...

Missing Pieces

Patrick Parrinder, 9 May 1991

Mr Wroe’s Virgins 
by Jane Rogers.
Faber, 276 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 571 16194 4
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The Side of the Moon 
by Amanda Prantera.
Bloomsbury, 192 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 7475 0861 5
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... Prantera has a liking for the stylishly off-beat; her previous novel, Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, featured a present-day biographical researcher with a computer (addressed as ‘My Lord’) which turned out to have Byron’s unpublished and unbuttoned memoirs stored away in its memory bank. The Side of ...

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