“... 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 ...”

“... discursive book, is the presence within the spectacle of elements that are substantially new. Byron is depicted by Max Beerbohm as shaking the dust of England from his shoes, but it is in an elegiac mood that he looks back at Newstead. Milton went to Italy, hoped to go on to Greece, but returned home when things looked bad there. ‘Oh, to be’ and ...”

“... or murderous. The question is well dramatised by a fine joke. David thinks ‘Ozymandias’ is by Byron and is appalled to learn from Walter that he is wrong, that he has, unthinkably, made a mistake. Walter gives him a rather sanctimonious lecture: ‘When one note is off, it is caught up by the entire orchestra, which quickly finds itself out of tune. It ...”

“... the Faustbuch of 1587), through Molière’s sophisticated immoraliste, E.T.A. (Amadeus) Hoffmann, Byron, Kierkegaard (the aesthetic v. the ethical) and Richard Strauss, to Shaw and Eric Linklater. The sociological aspects of the ever-interesting topic are not neglected. Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of ...”

“... truth to the minutiae of experience, and immense curiosity. These are Boswell, Harriet Wilson, and Byron in his letters and journals. Much of Cockshut’s book is taken up with the autobiographical treatment of childhood. As he emphasises, childhood experience is never ‘as it happened’, but always as the mature autobiographer shapes and presents ...”

“... Ballroom as Mirror of a Changing Society in 19th-Century America’. Quotations from writers like Byron, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Turgenev and Tolstoy (lots of Tolstoy – no one has written more memorably about balls) precede each section and raise the intellectual tone. The format is coffee table and the style olden ...”

“... the best swimmers in the world. Contests were held on rivers, diving off bridges was familiar, and Byron swam miles down the Thames with the tide. He wasn’t afraid to boast of his exploits: asked what he could do that other people couldn’t, he said he had four answers: ‘I could swim for four miles – write a book, of which four thousand copies should be ...”

“... by her mother, she was ‘a keen, precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, but modelled her first literary efforts ‘chiefly upon Jane Eyre’ and believed that Charlotte Brontë was the most passionate Victorian novelist. Braddon also enjoyed the popular fiction in penny magazines ...”

“... it say about readers of the Kilrush Magazine, for instance, that ‘poetry by Downes, Griffin and Byron’ vied for column inches with ‘articles on the wonders of the turnip’? While admiring the work of retrieval that went into the Irish Academic Press’s recent edition of James Clarence Mangan, I was struck by the fact that a modern edition cannot ...”

“... century has been the subject of as much biographical scrutiny as Ezra Pound. As in the case of Byron, Pound’s literary works and his personal life were deeply entwined from the first, and this condition of his poetry’s existence raises – as Byron’s work has always raised – serious problems for our ordinary ...”

“... The quarto text is, on the other hand, an expensive and handsome book whose audience is what Byron sometimes called ‘the twice two thousand’. In fact, that first edition was printed in 1500 copies, whereas the piracies were issued in their tens of thousands. This dramatic example, which I have given elsewhere, might be multiplied with ease – in the ...”

“... figures. When The Improvisatrice came out in 1824, she was described in the press as the female Byron, the English Sappho and, after the notoriously independent eponymous heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel, the English Corinne. Her ecstatic and melancholic verse appeared to exhibit her own passions in an age when ladies were supposed to keep quiet about ...”

“... and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and hobbies and miseries and follies; and in Joseph Banks, who kept a friendly eye on as many of them as he could during his long tenure as president of the Royal ...”

“... actresses, comedians, judges and lawyers. In addition, there are pieces on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Hunt and other literary figures. A taste for Hazlitt’s style matters a great deal in compiling an edition like this, because style is a considerable factor in arguments for attribution (pieces dug out from newspapers and journals are nearly always ...”

“... 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 ...”