“... leaves room to lay out an argument – the Spenserian stanza whose clinching alexandrine both Byron and Shelley, in their different ways, found so seductive: Wakening, I watched a bundle tightly packed That scaled with clockwork jerks a nearby staff. Hoist to the top, I saw it twitched and racked And shrugged and swigged, until the twists of chaff That ...”

“... influenced by their immediate precursors, in the sense that these precursors – Keats, Shelley, Byron – died before they could engage in the critique of their own earlier work which the Victorians were left to carry out on their own. But Tennyson and Browning, in their turn, did live long enough to prompt ‘the dialogue of the mind with its past ...”

“... have been ripostes to ‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ – and she was considered the female Byron. ‘The Ballad of the Harp Weaver’, which won her the Pulitzer, was turned into a song by Johnny Cash.Rhetorically, Millay was a genius: her mastery of attitudes and devices owed a lot to her training as an actress. She knew the value of a theatrical ...”

“... of the danger contained in the man himself.’ Napoleon in exile was Boney the bogeyman still. Byron eulogised him: Conqueror and Captive of the Earth art thou! She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name Was ne’er more bruited in men’s minds than now That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame. Over and over again Blackburn evokes the uncanniness ...”

“... of merit, nor of density, but of pace. If you read attempts by 19th-century English poets (Byron is something of an exception) to write poetic drama, and compare their lines with Shakespeare’s, the difference is all the more surprising because it’s so clear that Shakespeare was their model. Their lines are static where Shakespeare’s are ...”

“... Bohemian circles between the wars, a period for him as distant and exotic as that of Shelley and Byron. Unfortunately he is also determined to present it as a series of ‘stories’, as in a newspaper interview; and since for this book he apparently had no access to the subject of his ‘portrait’, both portrait and background are generalised to the point ...”

“... little shirts, and ‘kiss as though it had been God Himself’. (Four hundred years later, Lord Byron thought that Venetian women kissed better than any other, which he attributed to the worship of images and ‘the early habit of osculation induced thereby’.) Thomas More, who would become a saint himself, might insist that simple people could read images ...”

“... to whom she talks. Elsewhere, the narrator overhears two literary types humping in the bushes: ‘Byron! Oh …! Keats! Oh … oh! Kipling! Oh …! Oh – Oxford Book of English Verse! Ah … ah … ah … OH!’ Then there’s the dialogue: ‘She’s got a battery iron,’ I said. ‘A battery hen?’ ‘No – a battery iron,’ I laughed. ‘Iron using a ...”

“... of his audience and his conquest of himself. Of all the poets he surveys – Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley and Tennyson – only Pope displays a comparable political skill in exploiting an audience without being finally exploited by it. Yeats wavered once or twice, most especially in the Blueshirt days. But, as Professor Jack says of Pope, he recovered ...”

“... are left to tell the story, in the form of a very high-class strip-cartoon, rather as though Byron had elected to give an episode of Don Juan in the medium of Feiffer or Posy Simmons. Julia Taaffe and her sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ...”

“... more books than there have been days since his death) have been English. Writers as diverse as Byron and Belloc, Disraeli and Conan Doyle, Hardy and Hazlitt, have joined composers from Beethoven to Schoenberg, film-makers like Grune and Gance, and umpteen philosophers – especially German ones – in fêting and feasting on the legend. ‘I have beheld ...”

“... began to appear in 1848, declared his ambition to make history as compelling as a novel: not since Byron and Scott had a single book been such an instant public success. Macaulay was disgusted by Boswell’s life of Johnson. Biography, with controversial exceptions, entered the dark age of ‘lives of great men’. Hackman and Ray went with it, leaving ...”

“... taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the phrase: ‘created a sensation ... by ...”

“... to accept Shelley’s mendacious version of Harriet’s behaviour. And although Hunt, Trelawny, Byron and Hogg all counted themselves her friends at one time or another, none left any very warm account of her. Something became repellent to each of them, and pity could not overcome this. Even her own father’s description of her as a girl is proud rather ...”

“... 83 pages; The Romantic Period excluding the Novel (but including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb and Hazlitt) gets 127. But American Literature to 1900 requires 330 pages, and Twentieth-Century American Literature no less than 655. Great Writers indeed. Timothy Dwight, born in Northampton, Massachusetts 14 May 1752: ‘In his own ...”