“... to this book are from Büchner, the Goncourt brothers and Mark Twain, taking over the baton from Byron, Tchaikovsky and Flaubert in the previous volume. How far the thinking, writing, chattering, teaching and preaching classes who dominate the scene spoke for or to their less intellectual and vocal fellows (even, or especially, when they professed to do ...”

“... Tomlinson. (Shades of Kipling, just as the hero’s name interests us by being so close to that of Byron.) It must have been fun to do; it is also great fun to read. The writer on his last legs is the true hero, for manifesting such a soaring parting zest in his own skills. Its characterisation is often more subtle than that of Don Juan, just as its rhymes are ...”

“... It is certainly a ‘sad, sour sober beverage’. (There is so much in these pages that Lord Byron said first, and better, and with merciful brevity, and without the advantages of sociological research.) The men are always off on a fishing trip, the women always masturbating in the bathroom. When he comes home, they fight; she rants, and he sits there ...”

“... not a bit interested in the seriousness and exclusiveness of being a woman, and created a female Byron who ignores psychologically the female province. In their sexual imagination men see women as separate and isolated beings, and in this respect, too, women take over men’s imagination of them. The point is in a sense confirmed, rather than denied, by Tess ...”

“... friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went ...”

“... when it comes to poets Schmidt wants to attack biography does come in handy: see his paragraphs on Byron.) Poems, this critic modishly requires us to believe, are born not of individual poets but of other poems. Or, rather, they are born of the interaction between texts and readers – ‘good readers’, as Schmidt calls them. A good reader is one who, faced ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”