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Convenient Death of a Hero

Arnold Rattenbury, 8 May 1997

Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp., £12.95, December 1996, 0 85036 457 4
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... of posthumous decoration, for instance. To a few SOE bellet-rists he has become a would-be Lord Byron of Bulgaria: the poems, a high prose vein, even flamboyance (which he never had), oh, you know. To a diminishing huddle of elderly lefties – ‘pinkly-wrinklies’, I’m told – he remains an emblem of anti-Fascism. And there is of course Churchill’s ...

Power Systems

John Bayley, 15 March 1984

Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S. Eliot 
by Steve Ellis.
Cambridge, 280 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 521 25126 5
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Dante the Maker 
by William Anderson.
Hutchinson, 497 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 09 153201 9
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Dante: Purgatory 
translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa.
Indiana, 373 pp., £19.25, September 1981, 0 253 17926 2
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Dante: Paradiso and Purgatorio 
with translation and commentary by Charles Singleton .
Princeton, 610 pp., £11.80, May 1982, 0 691 01844 8
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Virgil: The Aeneid 
translated by Robert Fitzgerald.
Harvill, 403 pp., £12.50, March 1984, 0 00 271008 0
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... often homely precision and clarity into an equal precision of dream-like beauty and melancholy. Byron’s interest was much more local, centring on the incestuous figures and the guilty lovers. Guilt meant nothing to Shelley, but to the Scotch Calvinist latent in Byron it meant a great deal, and in his translation of the ...

Smoking

Norma Kitson, 7 March 1985

... the different recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos and their relative merits. He quoted from Byron and from Shakespeare. He was a man of culture and knowledge and I was impressed. Although I was terrified of these daily interrogations, as they came to be, I comforted myself that Viktor was a civilised man and that as long as I did not accept their ...

Incompetents

Stephen Bann, 16 June 1983

Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 48 pp., £5.50, April 1983, 0 7145 3979 1
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That Voice 
by Robert Pinget, translated by Barbara Wright.
Red Dust (New York), 114 pp., $10.95, May 1983, 0 87376 041 7
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King Solomon 
by Romain Gary, translated by Barbara Wright.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 00 261416 2
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A Year in Hartlebury, or The Election 
by Benjamin Disraeli and Sarah Disraeli.
Murray, 222 pp., £8.50, May 1983, 0 7195 4020 8
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The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 180 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 224 02130 3
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... there is the neo-Gothic Romance which takes as its focus the Byronic figure of Aubrey Bohun. If Byron had not died at Missolonghi, but had decided a few years after the Battle of Navarino to return in state to Newstead Abbey, he would presumably have created the same stir in the neighbourhood as Aubrey Bohun returning from Greece to the castle of his ...

Mrs Berlioz

Patrick Carnegy, 30 December 1982

Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz 
by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £12.95, September 1982, 0 521 24421 8
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Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves and Legends of Adah Isaacs Menken 
by Wolf Mankowitz.
Blond and Briggs, 270 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 85634 119 3
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... travestied the title role in Mazeppa, or The Wild Horse of Tartary, an atrocious adaptation after Byron. She was carried out of it when she died in Paris in 1868 after a whirlwind career not short on literary friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady ...

Italy Stirs

Adrian Lyttelton, 22 June 1995

Mazzini 
by Denis Mack Smith.
Yale, 302 pp., £19.95, April 1994, 0 300 05884 5
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Verdi: A Biography 
by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz.
Oxford, 941 pp., £30, October 1993, 0 19 313204 4
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The Real Traviata 
by Gaia Servadio.
Hodder, 290 pp., £20, October 1994, 9780340579480
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... he admired were those who provided the inspiration for many of Verdi’s librettos: Schiller, Byron, Victor Hugo and, beyond them, Shakespeare. For Mazzini, the Marchese Di Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos was the archetype of liberal values, and Verdi’s liberalism found its most memorable and direct expression in the great duet between Posa and Philip ...

In Memory of Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois

Rosemary Hill: Where is Bohemia?, 6 March 2003

Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts 
by Elizabeth Wilson.
Tauris, 288 pp., £11.99, October 2002, 1 86064 782 0
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Quentin & Philip 
by Andrew Barrow.
Macmillan, 559 pp., £18.99, November 2002, 0 333 78051 5
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... as outcasts. Crisp was first an outcast and then a star; Oscar Wilde went the other way, while Byron was both at the same time. Whatever the experience of individuals, the essence of bohemia as an idea, which is Wilson’s real subject, is a critique of middle-class values, a love-hate relationship between inside and out in which each needs the other to ...

Let in the Djinns

Maya Jasanoff: Richard Burton, 9 March 2006

The Highly Civilised Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World 
by Dane Kennedy.
Harvard, 354 pp., £17.95, September 2005, 0 674 01862 1
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... waning; his mind crowded with ethnographic trivia – to understand why he, more than anyone since Byron, lends himself so enthusiastically to romanticisation. Kennedy means to demystify a character who has become a poster-boy for idiosyncrasy. You will find only brief mention of Burton’s engaging exploits here – for these, Fawn Brodie’s The Devil Drives ...

Awfully Present

Thomas Jones: The Tambora Eruption, 5 February 2015

Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World 
by Gillen D’Arcy Wood.
Princeton, 293 pp., £19.95, April 2014, 978 0 691 15054 3
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... 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 buried deep under the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice core data also show evidence of a colossal (vei 6) eruption six years ...

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny 
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6
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... diabolic Castlereagh figure ‘tossed’ the dogs ‘human hearts to chew’. In the same year, Byron set out Castlereagh’s misanthropic and authoritarian vision of the world in Don Juan: States to be curb’d, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made – Cobbling at manacles for all mankind – A tinkering slave-maker, who mends ...

Go and get killed, comrade

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Spanish Civil War, 21 February 2013

Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism 
by Richard Baxell.
Aurum, 516 pp., £25, September 2012, 978 1 84513 697 0
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I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women Who Went to Fight Fascism 
by David Boyd Haycock.
Old Street, 363 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 1 908699 10 7
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... Pollitt told him, wasn’t to write about it but to ‘go and get killed, comrade – we need a Byron in the movement.’) The No. 1 Company went to Lopera with 145 men, and returned to Albacete in January with 67. There they were reorganised, along with a few hundred new recruits, into the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade. The British ...

A Spanish girl is a volcano

John Pemble: Apostles in Gibraltar, 10 September 2015

John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-31 
by Eric Nye.
Macmillan, 416 pp., £100, January 2015, 978 1 137 38446 1
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... This select brotherhood was heavily into male bonding, arcane causes and Wordsworth and Shelley (Byron was too worldly and cynical). They wrote poetry themselves and communicated via interminable letters about the meaning of life and the problem of how to act in order to realise the self and redeem the world. But in Tennyson’s day the Apostles didn’t hop ...

Flirting is nice

Mary-Kay Wilmers: ‘Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace’, 11 October 2012

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £16.99, April 2012, 978 1 4088 1241 9
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... hereditary descent, funds, paupers, emigration etc’. In the evening they talk ‘of Lord Byron, of riding, of courage, of balloons and of coolness’. As night falls and the moon comes up, they talk about ‘man’s spirit, his life, the grave, immortality, God, the universe, man’s reason and his short fleeting nature’. She tells Edward that she ...

Diary

Jonathan Raban: I’m for Obama, 20 March 2008

... a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten ...

Howl, Howl, Howl!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Fanny Kemble, 22 May 2008

Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life 
by Deirdre David.
Pennsylvania, 347 pp., £26, June 2007, 978 0 8122 4023 8
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... inclined to make women swoon – especially by contrast to the features visible in the sketch of Byron and Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, with whom Kemble was also flirting in the months leading up to her marriage. The letters she eventually placed in evidence during the divorce negotiations may have testified to her passionate love for her husband, but ...

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