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“... Byron’s Problem When they come up to you, as you’re sitting quietly, and lay their fat boobs on your knees, and look into your eyes with their own big eyes and wistfully caress your cheek and so, without speaking, say ‘Please!’ it’s a clear invitation to come out and play and you can’t just tell them to go away! When the wine’s round and they press up against you gently, it’s much like a musicless waltz as they talk about books (and they all write books) – that’s foreplay, nothing else, my son, true sex; it’s the talking that’s false! But you can’t make a snarky and sharpish riposte, with words like ‘Forget it!’, ‘Get lost!’ When they stroke your hair too, and finger your coat slyly, or lay a neat hand on your shirt, they all cast you as Faust (and they all know Faust), each one’s a Gretchen, maiden, pure; but they all want your hand up their skirt ...”

“... doffed dresses of once worshipped Muses. Maybe Melpomene’s hypothermia’s terminal, in what Byron called the ‘deserted shrine’ when he climbed up to Delphi in 1809. kali orexi, kali orexi, kali orexi like Lucky in Godot – quaquaquaqua – a man gagging on the life he’s been cursed with, ‘divine apathia, athambia, aphasia’, the least likely ...”

“... which is written almost entirely from primary sources and is local history at its best, deals with Byron’s widow in her Lady Bountiful role. Lady Byron certainly did quite a lot for the village of Earl Shilton – among other things, she opened a school there – but Herbert is perhaps inclined to exaggerate her ...”

“... Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis à vis? – on a table – and under it?’ Byron was onto something ...”

“... the game to a literary scene, one would have no trouble at all with the later Romantics – Byron, Shelley, Keats. Among the older generation, Blake and Coleridge might be a little more difficult. Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in ...”

“... examine what actually happened in the process of certain revisions in the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron, the Shelleys, Clare and Keats. In this second part of his work he has to take into account the fact, of special interest to some modern bibliographers, that other hands than the writer’s have often played a considerable part in the revisions. Leader ...”

“... Auerbach concedes, have not always been explicitly feminist. As early as the tales of Lord Byron and Dr Polidori (since Auerbach’s folklore sources are limited, this is where the vampire genealogy begins) the figure of the vampire ‘offered an intimacy, a homoerotic sharing, that threatened the hierarchical distance of sanctioned ...”

“... Tory William Mitford. Macaulay noted Mitford’s liking for Sparta and dislike of Athens; Byron declared outright, ‘His great pleasure is in praising tyrants,’ and yet allowed him to be ‘perhaps the best of all modern historians’. His merits, the poet thought, were ‘labour, learning, research, wrath, and partiality. I call the latter virtues ...”

“... an immensely influential European figure, a provoker of fashions in dress and suicide, a sort of Byron before Byron. He is 25. Troubled by this success in print – Götz was published to great acclaim but not staged for some time – Goethe seeks a different public and a different relation to the world. He moves to Weimar ...”

“... and Coleridge continued to rely on the 18th-century tradition of ballad and didactic poem, while Byron had successfully romanticised the more robust traditions of Dryden and Pope. Keats would read himself into style through a much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent ...”

“... The pace and charm of The Illusionists perhaps learned something from Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (in Letters from Iceland), and Auden was in his turn looking back to Byron, who habituated in verse the splendid militant pragmatic dottiness that Sterne had unleashed on the English novel. In terms of poetry, it is ...”

“... mark of a civilised unaggressive sensibility which is never soft, though it is sometimes lax as Byron was sometimes lax. Byron informed Pushkin’s work, and Johnston’s through Pushkin as well as directly. If Eugene Onegin derives to some extent from Byron’s Don Juan, The Bronze ...”

“... the Wye. Lady Oxford already had a liaison with Sir Francis Burdett, as she was later to have with Byron, and the paternity of her children was considered so doubtful that they became known as the Harleian Miscellany. Lady Holland wondered if the blame for Lady Oxford’s promiscuity should be traced back to Knight, who had ‘corrupted her mind by filling her ...”

“... Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza instead of the eight of Don Juan. Auden and MacNeice’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ which ends the book contains the ...”

“... were household names in Europe and the new United States. In Italy in 1821, Lord Byron christened his newly built yacht the Bolivar, overriding his impulse to name it after his mistress Teresa Guiccioli. Byron even thought (briefly) of migrating to Venezuela, because it was ‘Bolívar’s ...”