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“... Claire Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his child? From the journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1986, it seems clear that she was in love with Shelley at the age of 16 ...”

“... her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with Shelley and Byron. There has been a flurry of activity with reference to these poets in our own time: Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron and their associates have been the subject of recent visitations by literary scholars and editors, by ...”

“... Clairmont? I first heard this central question debated with great solemnity at a meeting of the Byron Society in Albemarle Street way back in 1978. I went with three fellow Shelleyans, Geoffrey Matthews, Claire Tomalin and Judith Chernaik, to hear Marion Stocking talk about Claire. Marion Stocking’s beautifully-edited Journals of Claire Clairmont had just ...”

“... Africa as a whole, is an impenetrably cloudy future. Amanda Prantera’s Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 162 years after his Lordship’s Death (another title that will infuriate cataloguers) has a neat premise. A super computer is programmed with every known fact about Byron: especially all the material in ...”

“... Jerome McGann’s seven-volume edition of Byron’s Poems has concluded with a magnificent index compiled by Carol Pearson. As columns to browse in, these are in the same league as the DNB or OED. Old Romantic hands might be tempted to look up ‘Rousseau’ or ‘Wordsworth’, but to test this edition with the name of another established writer would be to show you didn’t know what McGann stands for ...”

“... amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal’. The phrase was less harsh than it may seem to a modern ear, since a jackal, in the parlance of the time, was someone who busied himself on another’s behalf; but for Crane the metaphor has both a keener and a darker edge. He calls his first ...”

“... generations down from the period of heaviest immigration around the time of the Famine. Reginald Byron is a fourth-generation American with some Irish in him. He has lived in the UK since 1970, including 15 years in Northern Ireland. He became interested in Irish America when some of his Northern Irish students asked him, after a summer spent in Atlantic ...”

“... Iris Origo​ wrote biographies of an Italian poet, an Italian saint, a merchant from Prato, and Byron’s Italian mistress; her bestselling book was the diary she kept of her experiences on her estate in the Val d’Orcia in Tuscany during the Second World War. Everything in her life and writing was inflected by her relationship with the idea of Italy and its past (of course it was not always one ‘Italy’), as well as with the actual 20th-century country where she mostly lived ...”

“... Mrs Hemans – or Hewomans, as Byron called her, for no one was less of a he-man than Felicia – was lavishly praised in her lifetime, and second only to Byron in popularity and sales. But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War ...”

“... when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last surviving child returned to the England she had not seen since 1818. ‘The ...”

“... a million pounds to his heir, who became the first Lord Melbourne and married Elizabeth Milbanke, Byron’s friend and confidante. Dr Johnson’s opinion that the main motive for making money was to found a landed family was widely if not universally shared, and with it went the view that it was necessary for peers and baronets to possess landed property. In ...”

“... Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Macaulay, Carlyle; but it welcomes inquiries after the friend of Byron and Shelley and Keats, and the collaborator-friend of Lamb and Hazlitt. Indeed Fiery Heart begins before the beginning: it follows the family through two centuries, and from England to the Caribbean and North America and back again. As he approaches his ...”

“... a how-d’ye-do as we come to know Him and Her. In the case of Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron, it is less a question of discovering an interesting personality than of retrieving or rehabilitating one. The basis of the fiction here is a historical fact – that after his death, Lord Byron’s Memoirs were burned by ...”

“... fiction about German court life, religious revivals in the Middle East, the relations between Byron and Shelley, the machinations of Catholic prelates against an upright Englishman (a duke, inevitably), and Garibaldi’s march on Rome; as well as the politics of Young England and the ‘Condition-of-England Question’; not to mention a verse epic on the ...”

“... but difficult to interpret. ‘Do the two documents refer to the same Miguel de Cervantes?’ asks Byron at one point. ‘Probably they do,’ he replies, but we are left to wonder. Elsewhere he remarks disarmingly: ‘What was Cervantes up to while plague, famine, corruption and literary gloom swirled round him? It depends on which biographer you read. The ...”