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“... Did​ the Rwanda genocide happen because a few army officers and politicians, squabbling over whom they should appoint as leader, casually used mass murder as a means of obtaining a temporary consensus? The idea that the largest mass murder of the last 25 years came about through banal politicking is perhaps even more disturbing than the notion that it was the enactment of a grand ideological project ...”

“... emerge from the Letters and Journals is Byron’s flirtation in 1813 with Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, who was beautiful, new-married, and virtuous. While she and Byron played billiards under the nose of her husband, and passed increasingly passionate notes to one another in books, Byron was keeping Lady Melbourne posted on how his intended seduction was ...”

“... the other poet in Byron kept on ‘scribbling’ (it was his favourite description) away at Don Juan, and completed seven cantos (10-16), not to mention ‘The Age of Bronze’ and ‘The Island’. If the reader detects a certain loss of Byron’s accustomed brio in these letters, he should bear in mind that his main writing work was elsewhere. The ...”

“... identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s ...”

“... She found her interactions with Lyttle challenging. ‘How come you have a small nose?’ ‘Jews don’t have blue eyes.’ On and on he went, trying to interrogate her on her sexual preferences. Russo recalled legends of lovers who descended into the depths to reclaim partners enraptured by the goddess of death. Now she was involved with a Celtic minotaur ...”

“... survives by what he has in common with Ibsen, and not by what he has in common with Webster’). In polemical theatre, this misconception leads to the notion that the sugar of entertainment can somehow be sucked off the pill of propaganda (or, as T.S. Eliot put it, ‘if the audience gets its striptease it will swallow the poetry’). It is ...”

“... audience sympathy for her even as she nears death. She is, in fact, only slightly less guilty than Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, a woman ‘lower in her sexual drive than “a beast that wants discourse of reason” ’. Both characters become acceptable, as opposed to ‘surreally-threatening’, or ‘not-women’, only after suffering reduces them to ...”

“... enthusiasm, and Godfrey Smith asked: ‘What do you think about that, Francis?’ He replied: ‘I don’t know. I was asleep.’ There was never anything on his desk. He had a gesture, forbidding to an outside contributor, of sweeping imaginary flotsam from its surface with the little finger of his right hand, which, after a while, had raised a bubble like a ...”

“... and contemplating (over a game of billiards) the seduction of the chaste Lady Frances Wedder-burn Webster, while he confided in Lady Melbourne, suavest of older women, about both. The love of women hardly bothers Byron in his last months. His messages even to Teresa Guiccioli, the last attachment, are terse postscripts added to letters she was receiving from ...”

“... after his father’s death he wrote one of his great serious spoofs, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, a meditation, using a straight face and no ‘fine writing or purple patches’, on the idea of rewriting as an inspired enterprise, and on the concept of the writer as a force of culture imprisoned by language and time to such an extent that ...”