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“... question me about the ‘Leaves’, about my philosophy, politics, what I thought of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Burns. But when he got into the room, the debricity … of things – the confusion, the air of don’t care, the unusual look and atmosphere – must have struck him, abashed him, staggered him. For he hardly said a word beyond ...”

“... The visitors are mostly invalids. Death is the resident.”’ The Taylors became friends with Percy Shelley, the poet’s only surviving son, who had built Boscombe Manor, a grand pile with pillared porticoes that stood not far from the beach. Shelley kept his father’s dried heart in a box. It was said to have ...”

“... major economic depression’; not to mention several major works of Romantic literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’, Byron’s ‘Darkness’). One of the ways of investigating long-ago eruptions is by looking at the density of sulphate deposits ...”

“... encounter with Britain’s old power elites in the full glory of their Ozymandias-like hubris (Shelley, incidentally, only got a measly Poets’ Corner stone tablet, alongside Keats, in 1954). Much of the wealth that paid for them was accumulated through imperial wars and colonies – the abbey is still ‘the Commonwealth church’ – and unlike the ...”

“... and weight of water.’ A villa was built on the site of the spring near Como in the 16th century. Percy and Mary Shelley tried to stay there in 1818; it’s now a luxury hotel. The spring ‘runs under the building’, according to Dunn, visible from a window ‘on an otherwise unremarkable corridor’. Having retired from ...”

“... pages; The Romantic Period excluding the Novel (but including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb and Hazlitt) gets 127. But American Literature to 1900 requires 330 pages, and Twentieth-Century American Literature no less than 655. Great Writers indeed. Timothy Dwight, born in Northampton, Massachusetts 14 May 1752: ‘In his own time ...”

“... and of Bohemian circles between the wars, a period for him as distant and exotic as that of Shelley and Byron. Unfortunately he is also determined to present it as a series of ‘stories’, as in a newspaper interview; and since for this book he apparently had no access to the subject of his ‘portrait’, both portrait and background are generalised ...”

“... those feelings of bitterness, and became             MAGNANIMOUS. Keats advised Shelley to ‘curb his magnanimity’, but it was a word dear to Keats as to Dickens, expressive of new and wholly secular political and moral hopes. (A French ship of the line called the Magnanime fought at Trafalgar.) Had Keats died at an advanced age he would ...”

“... book, Child of Light (1951), a biographical study that more or less singlehandedly rescued Mary Shelley from being dismissed as Percy Bysshe’s excessively pious and/or difficult widow, views Frankenstein and The Last Man as – in Spark’s approving words from a Third Programme broadcast – ‘unconscious ...”

“... increasing desultoriness of her long-standing affair with an older, married man, the musicologist Percy Buck. Life had in the meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical ...”

“... letters by James to be published came in two volumes, overseen by the James family and edited by Percy Lubbock; they contained 403 letters and appeared in 1920, just four years after the novelist’s death. Lubbock found Mrs William James, the formidable widow of Henry James’s elder brother, moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and ...”