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“... that sustains it.’ On Scott: ‘Revolution is more genuinely his subject than Scotland is.’ On Byron: ‘Byron now succeeded Scott as the most fashionable author of the day, and he did so because his appeal, which was superficially rebellious and hence exciting, remained at a deeper level bipartisan.’ On ...”

“... heady eminence owed to projection and artifice, and desperately desired to compete with them. How Byron lived! But a real genius could write even more heartfelt poetry, and have an even more ardent army of young lady (and gentleman) worshippers. How inspired were Canning’s speeches; but how much more inspiration could be generated by someone with greater ...”

“... has come to terms with his own unimportance, or that he is unpopular because he tells the truth. Byron Rogers’s biography, The Man who Went into the West, punctures such fantasies to present Thomas as a man whose isolation sprang less from integrity than from a social ineptness that damaged his family, friends and ministry, though it also sponsored some ...”

“... to a War, with Isherwood in China. Letters from Iceland includes the virtuoso ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and much entertaining prose, if you don’t mind that a lot of it is very cliquish. Few reading it today for the first time will need convincing that the annotation of the long and gossipy ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament’, an ...”

“... certain privileged social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who was ...”

“... others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers. As it turns out, you’re not really famous until you’ve left a written trace ...”

“... is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.’ Or it might have been Byron, or Byron’s favourite, Samuel Rogers, both of whom put the solitude paradox into verse. It might even have been Cicero, quoting Scipio Africanus: nec minus solus quam cum solus esset. Hazlitt and Whitman did not much ...”

“... are Titillated and confused For novel combinations, or Ransacked for virtue. To be specific: As Byron said of Keats, ‘I don’t mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas.’ The exact quotation, incidentally, comes from a letter Byron wrote to John Murray on 9 October 1820: Mr Keats whose poetry you ...”

“... his own day Crabbe was a famous and distinguished author – the favourite of both Jane Austen and Byron. And while he had two distinct and distinctly successful careers, until the last two decades of his long life he was continually beset with disaster and the threat of disaster. The first of his two careers happened in the 1780s, before the commencement of ...”

“... as ‘a small man, not much smaller than Napoleon. He limped because of a club foot, as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to Goebbels’s ‘inspired oratory’. Concerning Kristallnacht she was scrupulously ...”

“... which it does very well. Waugh certainly belongs to that category of personalities, of whom Byron is the most obvious example, which both create themselves, and are created as an image of the time, an index of its social and ideological geography. If the man, or rather his elected personae, is more real than his books – an unusual state of affairs for ...”

“... Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human ...”

“... next British improvement would have to be an extension of democracy, or so Burns, Blake. Shelley, Byron, Keats, the early Coleridge and Wordsworth thought. They welcomed the French Revolution, believed in Tom Paine’s Age of Reason and Rights of Man, for these poets – not Pitt or Burke – were the culminating voices of 18th-century rationalism. They were ...”

“... public. In fiction, it was an interregnum between the age of poets, such as Poe’s hero Lord Byron, and the full flourishing of the 19th-century novel. Popularisers of science such as Herschel, Humphry Davy and the phrenologist George Combe sold in cheap mass market editions, printed on a new generation of steam presses with mechanised stereotyping and ...”

“... seem quite irrelevant to the contents of the books. It is known, for Coleridge mentions it, that Byron admired ‘Kubla Khan’ and that Lees-Milne admired Byron, for he makes a point of saying so, but the connection still seems tenuous. Myself a newcomer to the delights of these diaries, which are thought by some to be ...”