“... steam-propelled paddle-boat was launched on the waters of a French river. He met and talked to Byron, he knew and corresponded with Balzac, he had an affair with one of Delacroix’s mistresses: in this way, if in no others, he was caught up in that other revolution, European romanticism. But he was for ever on the sidelines, an interested spectator, never ...”

“... actress of her day – adored by theatre-goers in London and the provinces; acclaimed by Hazlitt, Byron and Coleridge; cartooned by Gillray, Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy ...”

“... movement. Over-eaters, over-shoppers, over-workers – everyone has their confessional niche. Byron famously remarked that ‘Augustine in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions’; no such envy is likely to arise from reading Ryan’s accounts of his joyless couplings. He reached his lowest point when he found himself driving ...”

“... places where a bottle can be concealed. The angel may tidy up and offer support, as Kathleen Byron does to David Farrar in The Small Back Room, telling him to ‘have a drink’ from the unopened bottle of Scotch which was 20-feet tall and toppling towards him just before she came in. More often though, she will have given up and drifted away, leaving ...”

“... implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’. Bánffy is the kind of writer Byron himself might have enjoyed: ‘Men of the world, who know the world like men,/Scott, Rogers, Moore, and all the better brothers,/Who think of something else besides the pen.’ Bánffy thinks of a great many other things, which the novels reveal through the ...”

“... Luminism’, ‘Letter to Walt Whitman’ (alluding to Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’), ‘Paul’s Tattoo’ (alluding to ‘Tattoos’ in James Merrill’s sequence ‘Peter’), ‘An Island Sheaf’ (alluding to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf), ‘Summer Landscape’, ‘Lily and Bronze’, ‘After the ...”

“... Georgina turned out to be very different from the typical pouting, lisping English miss who, as Byron complained, always smelled of bread and butter. She was both beautiful and bold in manner, almost hoydenish, and early aware of how to tickle the lusts of elderly gentlemen without satisfying them. Her good soprano voice gave her, and her father, the ...”

“... escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by mugging up or other ...”

“... His talent for imitation and pastiche has given rise to passable impersonations of Shelley, Byron, Joyce and MacDiarmid; it has also allowed him to transcribe the sentiments of animals, aliens, waking mummies, monsters and computers. The attempt to make a strange time and tongue communicate is supremely Morganish behaviour. But Beowulf has a rather more ...”

“... like shooting, and pursuing gazelles in motor cars. He rapidly wrote books on Verlaine, Swinburne, Byron and Tennyson, always justifiably anxious about their reception in the Bloomsbury circle (where his friendships were generally uneasy), and always keen that they should make money. The moment came when he had to choose between two uncertain futures. Part of ...”

“... flair in his rakish poems). Nor does it resemble the supple and disciplined sweep of Pope’s or Byron’s conversational verse. It’s both animated and plain, a putting down in the sense of efficient notation as well as of satirical flattening, deceptively simple but uncommon. It is found again perhaps in the opening of Swift’s ‘Legion Club’ and in ...”

“... Their profound distrust and ironic disdain of the Home Front, for example, is anticipated in Byron (‘He fell, immortal in a bulletin’) or Coleridge (‘Secure from actual warfare, we have loved / to swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!’). There are, as has been often noted, reverberations of Shelley in Owen or of ...”

“... most of them clothed in traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. ‘Now and then,’ Robert Byron wrote in 1933, ‘a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.’ Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron’s description than to a 1977 guidebook’s city of ‘mini-skirted ...”

“... conversation, as was just about everyone else who was privileged to hear it. Even the misogynistic Byron, who met her in Athens in 1810, didn’t deny it, though it seemed only to confirm his disapproval of ‘that dangerous thing, a female wit’. What was so remarkable about her conversation? Apparently, she talked interm-inably – for six to eight hours ...”

“... who swears too much at not quite the right times in order to show how manly he is. He isn’t, as Byron said of Keats, always frigging his imagination, but he often can’t stop himself from violating it. And this goes along with the instincts of a parodist, which lead him to invoke an earlier text (often one to which he is to a deep degree indebted) by means ...”