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“... royal favourite. Sheridan’s role in the impeachment proceedings had made him a hero to the young Byron, who wrote an elegy to him, but who, as the champion of oppressed peoples, would surely not have cared to know of his apology to the former Governor-General, consisting as it did in drawing a dubious distinction between his private opinions and his public ...”

“... predictable reaction was one of outrage, which killed it stone dead. Two senators, Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan, led the assault, calling PAM ‘harebrained’, ‘offensive’, ‘useless’ and ‘morally wrong’. They were, presumably, seeking to articulate the gut instincts of ordinary Americans, for whom the idea that US foreign policy might be dictated ...”

“... enlist a new member, he was betrayed and imprisoned. Isolated, with no books but ‘a Tacitus, a Byron and a Bible’, he decided that his life’s mission was to unite Italy under a republican government. Released after three months, he went into exile in Marseille where, in 1831, he formed the revolutionary movement Young Italy. Much abbreviated, the oath ...”

“... When Richardson finally dropped the pretence that he was planning to kill off Harriet Byron in order to allow Sir Charles to marry his other love interest, Clementina Porretta, Bradshaigh was full of joy and relief, but couldn’t see the funny side: ‘The joke was nothing more nor less than this, “I’ll write to a friend of mine and tell her ...”

“... will be blended in my tale.’ René (1802) was his great Romantic novel, much admired by Byron. In it Chateaubriand writes: I soon found myself more isolated in my own country than I had been on foreign soil. For some time I wanted to throw myself into a world that said nothing to me and wouldn’t listen to me … but I realised that I was giving ...”

“... even howling at deaths. Not just symbols of human virtue, but superior sensibilities (as the young Byron insisted in his epitaph to Boatswain, his Newfoundland dog and ‘one friend’), dogs became fit matter for poetry. Although these new ways of anthropomorphising animals were evidence of a more sceptical or secular mentality – ‘anthropomorphism’ had ...”

“... face now hangs in loose folds, like an elephant’s behind.’ The bons mots are reeled off. Byron is ‘a master not of language but of speed’. Nicolas Nabokov is ‘a composer who will never realise his talent because he cannot bear to be long enough alone’. ‘The steadiest business in the world would be a pharmacy next door to Stravinsky.’ Not ...”

“... at Isfahan, inside the Sheikh Lutfullah mosque – whose ornamental richness was thought by Robert Byron to outstrip that of Versailles or the Doge’s Palace – Kaplan sees ‘a frightening beauty’, ‘authority without wisdom or balance’: ‘the calligraphy suggested such an overabundance of the word that language itself seemed to lose meaning ... This ...”

“... and literary scholar but of a man of action. One needs to go back to Chaucer, Wyatt, Raleigh or Byron to find anything equivalent; and their lives were not nearly so various. Alldritt’s biography is briskly, even hurriedly, written in a kind of literary journalism that is serviceable and occasionally not quite that. The author has written a biography of ...”

“... ascending order of stylistic finesse) in the literary ballads of Gilbert and of Thackeray and in Byron’s great orchestration of comedy and pathos in Canto Two of Don Juan. They are part, it might be said, of the cultural embarrassment: a domestication and a coming to terms, often archly elaborate in their wordiness. Perhaps the greatest of all the literary ...”

“... not include, at the expense of the Essay on Man, more of the late, no-punches-pulled satires which Byron so admired). On the contemporary scene in general Paulin is gloomy. He laments that the popular tradition of political poetry is almost dead, but here the voice of the Faber Poet prevails over the politically engaged writer: the landscape is not as bleak as ...”

“... you will see and see with pleasure how much we agree. As for the eccentricities learned by Byron in Greece, they ‘would never separate me from any man I liked or was bound to’. While she emphasised her own ‘natural tastes’, she took the same liberal view of lesbianism: ‘What you speak of between women is utterly incomprehensible to me. As a ...”

“... which was a favourite method in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘No man,’ according to Byron, ‘ever took a razor in hand who did not at some time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life.’ The advent of the safety razor inhibited such morbidity. It is unlikely that anyone has ever held a Bic disposable in his hand and ...”

“... ploughs and rivulets, of commemoration and inner vexation and outward joy. We may imagine Auden or Byron, Pope or Muldoon sighing when Heaney calls poetry, in general, ‘a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence’. We may even wonder how ‘Punishment’ fits that bill; but that is what many of Heaney’s poems – and not only the recent poems ...”

“... the black stains left on my handkerchiefs.In the Romantic age, fog was mocked but also celebrated. Byron, in Don Juan, proposed the metropolis as ‘a huge dun cupola, like a foolscap crown/On a fool’s head – and there is London town’. Literary description of fog became an enjoyable duty for visiting writers. So, too, did dramatic pen-pictures of the ...”