“... of land; but because land was so valuable even aristocrats with relatively few acres – Lord Byron, for example – were asset rich. The wealth of the wealthiest was fabulous. The duke of Sutherland, who died in 1833, left a million excluding land. Since he owned one and a half million acres, he was worth at least seven times that amount. He was reputed ...”

“... imaginative or purely fictional work about the Balkans has been an overwhelmingly British habit. Byron can be said to have set it off. But the genre reached its zenith in the late 19th century and early 20th. Anthony Hope’s Ruritania seems to be located in Germanic territory rather than further south-east, but other writers – ‘Sydney Grier’ (Hilda ...”

“... acres of land. The tradition of the reckless, profligate nobleman was consummated in the career of Byron, in whom political dissent and sexual adventurism are hard to distinguish. Much the same was true of Shelley. In the wake of Nietzsche, a new kind of spiritual aristocracy was born, of which Wilde and Yeats, both scions of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, are ...”

“... Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article’). Burney was already dead, and Croker let rip. The diary was just gossip ‘treated with all the ...”

“... monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single emotion’ approach risks landing ...”

“... III. On either side, Chaucer’s laurelled successors are grouped: Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Byron, Pope and Bums. It was a massive undertaking, and Brown struggled to finish it. There were doubts. New ideas were in the air, and Brown’s composition came to seem uncomfortably grandiose and old-fashioned. Another picture was begun – simpler, lighter in ...”

“... in a well-defined cultural and literary tradition stretching from Richardson to Rousseau and Byron. They tended to re-enact the romantic roles that their contemporaries had become so excited about. In The Golden Gate the choice is between a hereditary and pastoral mode of life (Liz Dorati’s parents are wine-growers), the culture of protest and rock ...”

“... and ‘opinions’ soon crowd out ‘life’ as we might understand it. The memoirs left by Byron at his death were destroyed by his publisher John Murray, who thought them too shocking for print, which only caused readers to redouble their efforts to detect autobiography in Childe Harold. Each work has ambitions transcending the typically quotidian ...”

“... was a highly esteemed biographer and autobiographer, author of The Last Attachment (1949), about Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, his last mistress; The Merchant of Prato (1957), about a 14th-century Tuscan merchant and banker, and other Italy-oriented works. Her father, Bayard Cutting, came from an exceedingly rich New England family, with a fortune derived from ...”

“... new novel. They include Max Raymond, a melancholy saxophonist looking for a vision of God; Byron Egan, a preacher and ex-biker, tattooed on the cheek with a Maltese cross and given to injecting himself with holy water at the pulpit; Melanie Wooten, a beautiful widow in her seventies whose affair with the local sheriff elicits varying degrees of ...”

“... adventure stories of the period, together with bits of Moore’s Lallah Rookh, Kipling, Lermontov, Byron and other visiting Westerners, but straight from the horse’s (or camel’s) mouth. What better guarantee of veracity could readers ask for than that the tales assembled in Blood and Oil should be vouched for by a haughty Muslim nobleman, born among his ...”

“... a poem, though it doesn’t sound like it): ‘I probably had more women who loved me than Byron.’ What a silly, corny, sex-chauvinist, embarrassing boast. But he also says, more than once, that what would solve all his problems was to marry a rich woman. Not necessarily a rich woman he loved, you understand. Just a rich woman. Patrick Kavanagh did ...”

“... her ‘femininity’, as she confessed. Love has never been ‘woman’s whole existence’, as Byron fancied, but even the best-endowed of women may have found it harder to forgo than men. Those who succumbed to it were likely to learn that, as Eleanor wrote resignedly not many years before her death, for most women marriage is only a jump out of the ...”

“... biography, her heroic generosity and toughness – lie beneath these brilliant accounts of Lady Byron (arrogant and devious), Countess Tolstoy (‘devoted one minute, embattled the next’), and Pasternak’s jealous mistress Olga Ivinskaya. But they are not allowed to surface: only the dryest of comments implies the point of view: ‘Olga’s jealousy of ...”

“... Critical discrimination is not on offer. A reference to Auden as ‘the most famous poet since Byron’ is supposed to justify the axiom of ‘Auden’s genius’ six pages ...”