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“... but above all one of the most famous society hostesses in Europe, at different times the friend of Byron, Foscolo and Canova.’ In this manner, Francis Haskell begins the third of his selected essays, written over the last twenty years and brought together in this volume. It is a manner which seems to parody, in its relentless accumulation of the ...”

“... milkman had nearly run into the president and his wife while they were out horseriding. Captain Byron Lima Oliva of the EMP Presidential Guard had ridden out in front of the milkman’s van and signalled for him to stop. But the van kept coming, and Captain Lima was thrown from his horse and broke his arm. The milkman crashed his van into a parked car. EMP ...”

“... there are great writers whose letters and/or diaries add up to masterpieces of self-portraiture (Byron, Woolf, Flaubert); there are, and this, too, is a contemporary phenomenon, writers who turn to fiction after an explicitly autobiographical first book. But none of those cases is quite the same as that of the novelist of established reputation and ...”

“... Henry Lewes. The abbey finally commemorated her in 1980. In 1824, an earlier dean had turned down Byron’s body, brought to the abbey from Greece, with thousands turning out for his unofficial funeral procession. Two years before, by night for fear of riots, the abbey had buried Castlereagh – suicide, suspender of habeas corpus and sponsor of the ...”

“... Eliot’ was ‘litotes’). It’s noteworthy that Eliot appears by name in Letter to Lord Byron (1937), where Auden laments the fact that Eliot finds his addressee ‘uninteresting’. Like Byron, Auden would reinvent himself from abroad, and his move to the US in 1939 was in many respects a resistance to what was ...”

“... again with the rest of the boys. Until Russell Crowe kills him, that is. ‘I always liked you, Byron,’ Crowe says to his old enemy, ‘but you always did talk too much.’ Everyone in westerns talks too much, while carefully cultivating a myth of taciturnity. A matter of diction and idiom, perhaps. The new movie is incoherent at the end, too, where the ...”

“... hallucinatory power: the nearest English equivalent I know of is Mazeppa’s nightmare ride in Byron’s poem. Pushkin was fascinated by the figure of Mazeppa, the nobleman who, after an amorous intrigue, was expelled from Poland into the Ukraine tied to a horse, became Cossack hetman under Peter the Great, and went over to Peter’s enemy Charles XII of ...”

“... period of life through an assembly of indicative moments. Instead, like a biography of Dickens or Byron, this book is nearly cradle to grave: it describes sixty years of a life from the perspective of a man who wants to know what accidents led him to be where and who he is. It’s a reminiscence, sometimes fond, sometimes self-flagellating – and, for large ...”

“... spectres or enchantment’, the 1831 introduction made much of the ghost story competition between Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, in the cold and rainy summer of 1816, as the occasion of Frankenstein’s birth. In this light, the pedigree of Mr Gully’s Frankenstein – by Young ...”

“... Byron wrote that ‘I think it great affectation not to quote oneself.’ On that basis, I’d like to quote what I wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions ...”

“... insolence to anxious Tories. Wordsworth snubbed him at Mount Rydal. De Quincey, Scott and Byron questioned his breeding. Even his colleagues at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, when tired of baiting Cockneys, kept their hand in by goading Hogg. Hogg helped found Blackwood’s Magazine (or ‘Maga’); he co-authored the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, a ...”

“... life. Wordsworth? Well, that stuff about Lucy is really all about his affair with Annette Vallon. Byron? Just remember he loved his sister. Shakespeare? Didn’t you realise he was the Earl of Oxford? The other problem is that even the best examples can’t entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom – epiphenomena which are ...”

“... the wind’, preaching on the horrors of war in the Unitarian chapel at Shrewsbury. Shelley and Byron condemned or satirised war in their own styles. Blake may deserve the palm. He saw and heard in imagination, as we can do with less effort now: Albion’s mountains run with blood, the cries of war and of tumult Resound into the unbounded night. And he ...”

“... nothing until now. Penguin sent me some books from their recent series of diaries and letters.* Byron, I am afraid, meant little. Harold Nicolson’s diary gave me some pleasure, though I had read it often before. What has really delighted me is The Daughters of Karl Marx, their family correspondence between 1866 and 1898. Their letters are full of hardship ...”