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“... earlier sections of this book’. The ducks in his gallery include Rochester, Oldham, Swift, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Dryden, Burke, Addison, Steele, Richardson, Boswell, Thomas Moore and Jane Austen. Rochester to Burke come under the rubric of satire; Addison and Steele to Austen, under that of sentiment. The question, what is Rawson up to, might then be ...”

“... sentiments before being flung off. ‘Enough plots to provide anyone else with ten novels,’ Byron Rogers said, dusting himself down. In the course of an arduous round of radio appearances to publicise the book, Story started to miss dates and generally show signs of confusion. He became convinced that he was the victim of just such a conspiracy as he ...”

“... it has the qualities Auden praised in Jane Austen’s work, when he wrote (in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’) that You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’, Reveal so frankly and with such ...”

“... present comfort neglected, in an intense interaction, inspired by the fumey influences of Shelley, Byron and Blake. The charismatic Charles Hoop, orator and visionary, compels men, women and children into his orbit, not always to their benefit. Dame Betty: Her School tells how the widow of an Army captain, left destitute, taught the neighbours’ children in ...”

“... may have had Glorvina in mind when she created Mary Crawford a few years later in Mansfield Park. Byron thought Glorvina ‘fearless’, which Mary Crawford certainly is. Mary, like Glorvina, is a notable harp performer and full of charm, even of ‘warmth’, qualities much in vogue in Regency circles and associated with Tom Moore and the fashion for ...”

“... all. Here he is in a letter to Mary, written from Ravenna in August 1821 (he was holidaying with Byron, always an unsettling experience): ‘My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you – our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, – shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. I would ...”

“... whereas in fact there seems to have been only amusement’. Whatever the merit of such books as Byron: The Last Journey and whatever the fluency of most of Nicolson’s writing, there is something wrong in the perspectives of a biographer who can recount his subject’s meeting with James Joyce and speak without irony or other differentiation of ‘the two ...”

“... literal sense, but at times they blaze with a most uncommon splendour.And how thoroughly enjoyable Byron can be; indeed, it seems to me that the sea comes off better at the hands of poets than of those whose prose strives earnestly upwards, and this applies to modern or fairly modern poets too (though it must be admitted that Pound’s attempt on The ...”

“... perhaps of a broken heart and too much pride, possibly from an overdose of laudanum and too much Byron. Alf has his one-night stand with the student’s mother; Buchanan gets entangled in party politics, becomes American envoy to Russia. Alf’s romance collapses, he returns to his marriage; Buchanan seeks vainly to stave off the Civil War. There probably ...”

“... from 1640 to 1660 had been the fulcrum of British history. So it remained until our own time. Byron commemorated ancestors who generations before had fought for a necessitous king and ‘wished to strew/self-gathered laurels on a self-sought grave’. Shelley began a stage play to celebrate Charles I. Royalism was romantic, not least in the hands of Sir ...”

“... the violence that lies below the polished surface. Scott’s blood-stained ballads, Byron’s reflection that ‘upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise’: these were the collisions of civility and brutality that awaited Gage. Soon, rumours of the battles at Quatre Bras, Ligny and Waterloo began to reach him and on the evening of the ...”

“... habitual drunkenness and slovenliness, which earned him the disapproval of contemporaries such as Byron, were also often noted. Hall and Stead relate his uncouth behaviour, speculatively but plausibly, to the discomfort he may have felt – as the son of a Norfolk weaver – in the gentlemanly surroundings of Cambridge. They also draw attention to his ...”

“... influenced by their immediate precursors, in the sense that these precursors – Keats, Shelley, Byron – died before they could engage in the critique of their own earlier work which the Victorians were left to carry out on their own. But Tennyson and Browning, in their turn, did live long enough to prompt ‘the dialogue of the mind with its past ...”

“... calling the poems in Letters from Iceland ‘rough Byronic verses’. Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is less rough than anything by Byron himself. But Waugh must be allowed his prejudices. What startles is how few of them he allowed to show. The magazine made him well-mannered. It brought out the best in all its ...”

“... leaves room to lay out an argument – the Spenserian stanza whose clinching alexandrine both Byron and Shelley, in their different ways, found so seductive: Wakening, I watched a bundle tightly packed That scaled with clockwork jerks a nearby staff. Hoist to the top, I saw it twitched and racked And shrugged and swigged, until the twists of chaff That ...”