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“... have been ripostes to ‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ – and she was considered the female Byron. ‘The Ballad of the Harp Weaver’, which won her the Pulitzer, was turned into a song by Johnny Cash.Rhetorically, Millay was a genius: her mastery of attitudes and devices owed a lot to her training as an actress. She knew the value of a theatrical ...”

“... Another gobbet for the conglomerate soup. The archive, which includes memorabilia such as Byron’s trophy collection of his lovers’ pubic hair, was retained as personal property by the Murray family, who have assured the NLS that any money they receive from the sale (if it goes through) will be applied to a charitable trust. As a publisher, Murray ...”

“... of pages are defaced in the attempt. So many half-heard whispers flawed by others – Lord Byron, or future biographers and scholars arguing over punctuation. In the Northampton asylum words fractured into individual letters and spilled from Clare’s head, leaking from his ears. ‘I am in the Land of sodom where all the peoples brains are turned the ...”

“... entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot. When Russell died in 1947 he was described in the Times as ‘that most endearing of Somerset farmers’ – the best tribute they could come up with. Russell was ever a countryman, proud of his mangels: raised in rural Surrey, he was discomposed in ...”

“... to question me about the ‘Leaves’, about my philosophy, politics, what I thought of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Burns. But when he got into the room, the debricity … of things – the confusion, the air of don’t care, the unusual look and atmosphere – must have struck him, abashed him, staggered him. For he hardly said a word beyond ...”

“... around London offered some curious sights in the 1840s. To the north in Epping Forest the infant William Morris could be seen riding out in a toy suit of armour, while down in Surrey, in the Tillingbourne Valley, little Gertrude Jekyll was learning to make gunpowder. In the event it was Morris who became the political revolutionary and Gertrude Jekyll who ...”

“... in English literature from Shakespeare downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not ...”

“... of Independence. But then, Emerson never did feel great kinship with vanguard abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, much less with aspiring literary women like Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who brought the injustices of slavery home to ordinary American readers. When, in 1850, Emerson came to support anti-slavery, he did so more from ...”

“... The balance and sustenance of alternate tones are often in Larkin, as they were in Byron, a balance and sustenance of alternate rhetorics, neither of which is authentic in itself but which in conjunction and mutual critique can be magnanimously right.It is a feat of this book that, for all its grudging and its grudges, it should feel so ...”

“... textile industry for three generations, and Edward expanded the family business by partnering with William Scofield, his Harvard classmate and Florence’s brother. A leading wool manufacturer, Edward bought the fanciest house in town (his son would call it an ‘orgulous pile’) and a steam yacht (which his wife promptly made him sell) before dying of ...”

“... We are a very long way here from the possibility of a writer’s life being ‘snuffed out’, as Byron put it (with Keats in mind), ‘by an article’.The valiant contender for literary fame is typically opposed, in Johnson’s verse and prose, to a hostile public. Such an oppositional relationship was inevitable. The would-be poet, essayist, novelist or ...”

“... leave the excavation site. The earlier period of Mackenzie and Scott needs more attention, and William Taylor of Norwich and the increasing company of provincial Dissenting students of German are too quickly dismissed; the large band of translators of Schiller (apart from Coleridge) is unaccountably ignored. The scholars of the Classics, philosophy and ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... Georgina turned out to be very different from the typical pouting, lisping English miss who, as Byron complained, always smelled of bread and butter. She was both beautiful and bold in manner, almost hoydenish, and early aware of how to tickle the lusts of elderly gentlemen without satisfying them. Her good soprano voice gave her, and her father, the ...”

“... burden of guilt accumulated both where there was such a liaison (as there had been between Byron and his half-sister) and where it seemed dangerously possible (as in the Thackeray and Wordsworth households). In addition, Christian doctrine defined husband and wife as one flesh, and this created theological reservations about marriage with a deceased ...”