“... 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 ...”

“... Mihai Eminescu or Robert Burns, Shakespeare barely looks like a national poet at all, unlike Byron, as Dović and Helgason point out, whose engagement with liberal politics and eventual death in the cause of national liberation (even if it was the liberation of Greece rather than his own country) helped him fit the 19th-century nationalist bill much more ...”

“... catalogue: it shows three deformed feet labelled as belonging to Oedipus (of the swollen foot), Byron (with his club foot) and ‘Bootsy’ (a family friend, and Antigone’s godfather, nicknamed for the special orthopaedic shoe he wore). Shortly before she left the Slade, Dean too started limping: the first sign (‘as if my mind knew back then ahead of my ...”

“... them, or it. As aid workers they seemed absent. The school, incidentally, is to be called the Lord Byron: an imaginative touch, recalling Byron’s struggles with the Armenian language in Venice in 1815, and perhaps beyond that, his fight against Ottoman tyranny, something with which the Armenians came to grips only when ...”

“... priapism, as that Sun headline would suggest. (Yes, in this context Mr Benedictus dutifully quotes Byron, ‘What men call gallantry, and the gods adultery,/Is much more common where the climate’s sultry,’ but this is one of several hares he starts but does not dispatch.)So to more serious matters, like weather forecasting. The book contains a prodigiously ...”

“... Writers of indubitable greatness have been distorted by their legend, like Dr Johnson and Byron. Those of less certain status, like Oscar Wilde, have been left by it in a sort of limbo, where we never know what it is we are being asked to admire, their life-style or their art. Edith Sitwell comes in this class, and Victoria Glendinning’s biography ...”

“... had carried the reputation of English literature across the continent of Europe, Swift, Milton and Byron. Grierson had a special title to speak about Scotland. Another lecture, on ‘Scott and Carlyle’, begins: ‘The lives of the three greatest of Scottish imaginative writers – Burns, Scott and Carlyle – overlapped in an interesting and, for each ...”

“... in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this ...”

“... in literature would know already. In an initial compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all ...”

“... is the Most Feigning’ to Edgar Wind. Kitaj borrowed a line from Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ for the title of the Arts Council exhibition he selected in 1976 – The Human Clay – though it was Hockney’s love of the phrase that drew it first to Kitaj’s attention.Kitaj discovered Walter Benjamin through reading an essay by Gershom ...”

“... a note praising the satire’s bold manoeuvres under the ‘Argus Eye’ of the authorities. For Byron in the early 1820s, no radical publications of recent years could match the virulence and courage of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743): ‘had he lived now he would have been denounced … as the grand Mouth-piece and Factionary of the ...”

“... Half Price Books, which in my childhood lived up to its name. Both obsessions had their heroes: Byron among the Romantics – principally, I think, for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but ...”

“... mysterious job and that it was not for him to press it further. Don Juan comes to an end because Byron cannot keep up the pressure and think up further adventures to which his imagination can really respond, and so he loses interest. Evgeny Onegin does not end in this sense at all. In it Pushkin tells us that when he began what he calls his ‘free ...”

“... Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard ...”

“... Locke, Swift, Mandeville, Hume, Gibbon, Erasmus Darwin, Hartley, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Byron, Coleridge and many, many more are vigorously characterised and placed in an intelligible narrative. Schama is right to say that the author’s death is the more shocking because the book is so exuberantly vital; Porter was at the height of his powers. One ...”