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“... poetry even as they deplored the politics, which they saw simply as a biographical circumstance. Byron lost patience with The Excursion, which he thought turgid, but captured the problem with perfect succinctness: ‘Wordsworth – stupendous genius! damned fool!’The fact remains that Wordsworth wrote most of his best verse in the 1790s, certainly before ...”

“... there suddenly, she was impressed and happy that he was living in New York City.’ In ‘Billy Byron’, a tennis prodigy is visited by a spirit he calls Walter, who gives him the ability to anticipate the direction of the ball ‘with unusual accuracy’. Several of the stories begin at swanky dinners or cocktail parties where accounts of ghost sightings ...”

“... collected works is the posthumously published Les Tables tournantes de Jersey, in which Racine, Byron and Shakespeare figure among the writers who come and shoot the breeze with Hugo (Shakespeare admits that English is inferior to French). One discussion begins with Hugo asking Chénier: – Is something bothering you? (silence) – Are you still ...”

“... any number of authors more interested in embodying linguistic difference in their writing: Sterne, Byron, Joyce, Gadda, Amelia Rosselli. The closest point of comparison is probably Christine Brooke-Rose, whose novel Between, published in 1968, inhabits the consciousness of a simultaneous interpreter who – like so many of Marani’s characters – is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... eight hundred pages, probably contains more vocatives than Swinburne and more ejaculations than Byron. Fraser’s uncritical attitude to his subject’s works goes hand in hand with a nit-picking thoroughness about the facts of his life: we are told at one point that ‘Barker stayed in British Columbia for almost exactly one calendar month.’ At every ...”

“... of privileged murderers and robbers whose impunity has been the consecration of crime’. Byron, too, would have passed the test despite an ancestor having fought on the Royalist side at Marston Moor. He was not an admirer of kings, and he thought Cromwell both ‘the sagest of usurpers’ and an ‘immortal rebel’. Macaulay himself thought that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and was much impressed by its enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He observed that ‘in Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs’: it appears that, where England is concerned, things haven’t changed in that respect. Not that he was uncritical: the student corps, with their drunkenness and ...”

“... Sally Festing is embarrassed by Gertrude Jekyll’s social snobbery. The result is like a life of Byron written by someone who would rather not mention sex. Gertrude Jekyll’s sense of social distinction was as finely developed as her sense of smell, and almost as useful in her career. She never shared Morris’s enthusiasm for the working classes and ...”

“... US current affairs TV show, Sixty Minutes, and by New York Magazine, whose reporter Christopher Byron accuses those who take Coleman seriously of ‘chipping away at America’s faith in her institutions’. David Leppard, who has never explained the contradictions between the articles he published in 1989 and his 1991 book on the subject, wrote recently in ...”

“... end, and was therefore tragic. Macaulay in a famous passage spoke of the British public savaging Byron in one of its ‘periodical fits of morality’: ‘He was excluded from circles where he had been the observed of all observers. All those creeping things that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and they were right, they did ...”

“... correspondents have both a hunger for experience and the itch to communicate it: one remembers Byron, attending in Rome the beheading of three robbers, sitting near the front with his opera-glass trained on the spectacle, and insisting in the letter written hot on the heels of the event that one should ‘see everything, once’. This wasn’t Hardy’s ...”

“... book, but it may not be long before the Ottoman Empire becomes part of the EEC: what would Byron – he appears on the dust-jacket in Albanian national costume – have made of that? Rupert Christiansen’s Romantic Affinities is a very different affair – a guide to an age, inspired apparently by an understandable fit of summer glooms on marking ...”

“... skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the exercise, for the ...”