“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... matters what you wear in the Caribbean’). It is also ill-advised to wear a shirt collar draped, Byron-fashion, over the collar of a jacket, as Somerset Maugham is seen doing in Chenoune’s book. It was Sir Hardy who, in 1959, rattled Savile Row by undertaking to design suits for the multiple-tailoring firm of Hepworth. ‘We knew that we were going to use ...”

“... of subjects (four operas based on Schiller, three on Shakespeare, two on Victor Hugo, two on Byron), but in a breadth of grasp, human and historical, which sometimes outdoes his source: this in both text and music, for Verdi was virtually his own librettist and used Francesco Maria Piave as a mere versifying dogsbody. Verdi and Hugo shared a love of ...”

“... are shabby fellows, true, but poets still,/And duly seated on the immortal hill,’ wrote Byron with reference to the Lake poets. In honouring Faulkner’s Parnassian talent, Karl doesn’t try to conceal the shabbiness of several aspects of his personality. He emerges from these pages as another of the Great Authors one is glad not to have known ...”

“... which he touchingly felt to lurk just a few months’ hard work away. He was not, like Byron or Stendhal, both a poet or a novelist and a legend. At the same time he was obsessed with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those ...”

“... all his academic baggage behind. As a travel writer he inclines far more to Theroux than to Robert Byron, with Theroux’s delighted fascination with conversational absurdity and a comparable resourcefulness in undertaking an arduous trip. No car touring or sightseeing or cool drinks on the terrace. His is also a thoroughly English book, though: good-humoured ...”

“... country, and that in such places our laughter is our only hope. ‘No hopes for them as laughs,’ Byron remembered a preacher saying, when he and his half-sister had been giggling in church. No hopes for them as ...”