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“... Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on heterosexual intercourse, Blake and Shelley both drew a firm line at other practices: Blake at masturbation (‘The self enjoyings of ...”

“... The era has been viewed as something of a literary hiatus, with Romanticism in decline after Byron and the Victorian serial yet to emerge with Dickens. Secord gallantly proposes some counter-examples, but the thrust of his argument is that these years witnessed a surge in the non-fiction market: a greatly expanded reading public educated itself as never ...”

“... grounds that they were intellectually unsympathetic; he sought a mentor and father substitute in William Godwin, and then alienated him by eloping with his daughter, Mary; he discarded Harriet and their two small children, and in 1816 she drowned herself. His actions were reckless, destructive and poignantly venturesome; they had consequences which darkened ...”

“... problem with gave implications’ (page 339), page 286 tells us twice in three lines that William Ogilvie was a Scotsman; Whitley Stokes is ‘thanked for his answer to Paine by the board of Trinity College’ on page 199, with the exact words repeated (apart from the belatedly respectful capitalisation of ‘Board’) in the ensuing footnote; John ...”

“... the greater ode, blank verse or, as a regular practice, standard English. You can’t overdo what Byron termed Burns’s antithetical mind: ‘tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used ...”

“... by disinterested Solomons, free from prejudice, passion, envy and the desire for fame or money. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, prime minister in 1834 and 1835-41, had no such illusions. He loved reading history because it pricked the pomposity of vain and foolish ‘great men’. But he also knew that historical judgments were relative and that ...”

“... now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as William Hazlitt neatly observed, only in that he was always an extremist and always wrong: then, he had been an ‘Ultra-Jacobin’ and ‘frantic demagogue’ who ‘did not stop short of general anarchy’; now, he was an ‘Ultra-Royalist’ and ‘servile ...”

“... in the hollow of His hand’. But to make him popular and influential in the England of William III, the Ludlow of the memoirs was largely stripped of his religion and made a secular figure. The memoirs, Worden points out, transformed Ludlow from a saint into a patriot. Algernon Sidney was another Roundhead pressed into service as a radical Whig ...”

“... and the Lucy poems must have struck home like early Betjeman, or indeed like Larkin himself. Byron and Pushkin make a particular fetish of not being ‘writers’, and so in his different way did Kipling. These names probably confuse an issue which could be put quite baldly – as by Larkin again – by saying that content in poetry is not for the reader ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... spot him as a winner?’ Naomi Mitchison asked in one of the earliest reviews. A few months later William Empson wrote at some length about ‘Paid on Both Sides’. He was impressed by Auden’s ability to make ‘psychoanalysis, surrealism, and all that’, all the irrationalist tendencies ‘which are so essential a part of the machinery of present-day ...”

“... and the beginnings of adult education. The narrative includes a public meeting addressed by William Cobbett, and a letter from New Harmony, Indiana, giving a graphic account of jealousies and discords in the Owenite model community. John Wroe himself is the sort of preacher whose divinations and vaticinations were denounced by Carlyle, and at the end of ...”

“... at Marconi, Ronnie Wolfe, introduced him to the author who was to be his hero and inspiration, William Saroyan. Wolfe, later to become a successful television comedy writer in partnership with Ronald Chesney, urged Story to get hold of Saroyan’s latest collection of stories, Dear Baby. He did so, and was bowled over. According to Darwent – also a ...”

“... all. Here he is in a letter to Mary, written from Ravenna in August 1821 (he was holidaying with Byron, always an unsettling experience): ‘My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you – our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, – shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. I would ...”

“... literal sense, but at times they blaze with a most uncommon splendour.And how thoroughly enjoyable Byron can be; indeed, it seems to me that the sea comes off better at the hands of poets than of those whose prose strives earnestly upwards, and this applies to modern or fairly modern poets too (though it must be admitted that Pound’s attempt on The ...”