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“... 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 ...”

“... between sensation and idea. Whether to his friend Kinnaird, or his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote as if talking, although there is a touch of Hazlitt in his comparison of Augusta and himself to Paolo and Francesca, ‘whose case fell a good deal short of ours – though sufficiently naughty’. Wordsworth by contrast has an odd unnatural ...”

“... has bestowed on me’. This great blessing only momentarily delayed his visit to Dublin, prompting Byron to write: Ere the Daughter of Brunswick is cold in her grave,     And her ashes still float to their home o’er the tide, Lo! George the Triumphant speeds over the wave,     To the long-cherished Isle which he loved like his – bride. But George ...”

“... the American literary critical scene has swept the six major poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats all count as ‘canonical’) to prominence and indeed to modishness, without for a moment implying that radicalism or atheism have suddenly become acceptable doctrines with which to confront the young. A highminded exercise in ...”

“... dried up except for the occasional selective bounty bestowed by such notably successful authors as Byron and Dickens on their less fortunate or less gifted fellows. Beginning about 1830, Grub Street became an outpost of Fleet Street. Day-to-day journalism, not to be confused with the ‘higher’ variety, was an honest way of making a living, but until late in ...”

“... actually suppresses some of the farce in episodes meant by their participants to recall what Byron spoke of as ‘the monstrous mummeries of the Middle Ages’. Citing the Champion of England’s ritual appearance at the Westminster Hall banquet attending George IV’s coronation in 1821, he neglects the fact that, instead of rising from the ground like ...”

“... in English literature from Shakespeare downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not ...”

“... The first explicit allusion, half a dozen pages into the novel, comes when Jamie reflects from Byron: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence. ‘He picked up the coffee-pot. By Byron’s standards, he was not a man.’ But is he even an existence? Twenty pages later, and now in ...”

“... for great art, she nonetheless equates the ‘possession’ poets speak of with manic states. Byron, Blake, Coleridge, the Jameses, Melville, Van Gogh and, of course, Virginia Woolf are all tested, by their works and their known heredities, for bipolar illness and the findings are positive. While Jamison acknowledges that ‘there are many ...”

“... to publish made him a contemporary of the more flamboyant second Romantic generation, that of Byron. Crabbe looked all the more conservative and unglamorous as the poet of domestic and village life in the flatlands north of the Thames estuary. I encountered an undergraduate this summer, taking his final examinations at Oxford, who had been challenged by ...”

“... the myth of failure first promoted by Clough’s well-meaning friends. But unlike his precursors Byron and Goethe, Clough declined to romanticise his disenchantments. There was no need, when they possessed attractions of their own: ‘To move on angels’ wings were sweet;/But who would therefore scorn his feet?’ This didn’t stop others doing it for ...”

“... a trace of the millennialism that had informed her anti-slavery. Although, in her notorious Lady Byron Vindicated, she explicitly criticised the English marriage laws that made the position of the married woman ‘in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave’, she, like Child, refused in the end to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan ...”

“... The balance and sustenance of alternate tones are often in Larkin, as they were in Byron, a balance and sustenance of alternate rhetorics, neither of which is authentic in itself but which in conjunction and mutual critique can be magnanimously right.It is a feat of this book that, for all its grudging and its grudges, it should feel so ...”

“... Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life ...”

“... his Russian grievances, only to be told this wasn’t appropriate. So it was, in the words of Lord Byron watching from a nearby rooftop, that ‘Bellingham was launched into eternity.’ Everyone – save, presumably, the prison chaplain – was impressed. ‘His deportment,’ the otherwise hostile Morning Post adjudged, ‘was calm, manly, and even at times ...”