“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... plagiarism in the year 2000, Brazilian literature, Victorian myth-making, lesbian studies, Byron, Middleton, Melville, Stevens, Conrad, Woolf and Dante. In a sobering session on ‘Free Speech and Hate Speech in the Classroom’, a professor at New York’s LaGuardia Community College explained how she handles such student editorialising as ‘Jews are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Styx, Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, Dante’s Justice of Trajan, Euripides’ Medea, Byron’s Marino Faliero – that Delacroix had assembled to represent his career. In particular, Lion Hunt was even bigger (the same height, but a foot or so wider) than Liberty Guiding the People, Delacroix’s painting of the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy ...”

“... to question me about the ‘Leaves’, about my philosophy, politics, what I thought of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Burns. But when he got into the room, the debricity … of things – the confusion, the air of don’t care, the unusual look and atmosphere – must have struck him, abashed him, staggered him. For he hardly said a word beyond ...”

“... hold untrammelled sway. Discussing the prosody of Don Juan is all very well, but how on earth did Byron get to Sintra on a club foot? As far as such literary prurience goes, Claussen remains high-mindedly Teutonic. Beyond a discreet allusion to the fact that female students found him attractive, a fact the photographs of him provided in this volume do nothing ...”

“... the other a paladin who combines the wealth of Croesus, the wisdom of Solomon and the beauty of Byron. But their glamour is pallid beside the turpitude of Dickens’s Nickleby, Dombey and Merdle, or Trollope’s Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it ...”

“... The era has been viewed as something of a literary hiatus, with Romanticism in decline after Byron and the Victorian serial yet to emerge with Dickens. Secord gallantly proposes some counter-examples, but the thrust of his argument is that these years witnessed a surge in the non-fiction market: a greatly expanded reading public educated itself as never ...”

“... runs down the years in Grigson’s book. After visiting the menagerie at Exeter Change in London, Byron wrote of a ‘hippopotamus, like Lord L.L. [Liverpool, the prime minister] in the face’, and an ‘Ursine Sloth’ that had ‘the very voice and manner of my valet’. But the capacity for seeing human traits in animals came hand in hand with a capacity ...”

“... take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a timetable, with tears of pride. Take your Byron … give me Bradshaw.’ Chesterton’s joke is a sly pun: Baudelaire used the term ‘correspondance’ to evoke the world’s occult, holistic system of connections that our senses synaesthetically perceive, but it’s also the French word for a train ...”

“... appointed by Republican presidents. In dissent were Rehnquist, another Nixon appointee, and Byron White, a socially conservative Democrat, who had been nominated to the court by John F. Kennedy. Over time, however, the growing influence of evangelical moralism in Republican politics meant that opposition to Roe emerged as a litmus test of party ...”