“... are an oddly assorted bunch, including among others Goya, Piranesi, Fuseli, William Shenstone, Byron, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Poppy Z. Brite and David Lynch. ‘Gothic’ is no doubt as variable in definition as it is in quality, but one can’t avoid the sense of a certain arbitrariness of selection. It is not so much that any obvious authors ...”

“... Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on heterosexual intercourse, Blake and Shelley both drew a firm line at other practices: Blake at masturbation (‘The self enjoyings of ...”

“... and flatter males. This is someone, after all, who opted to write her MA thesis on Lord Byron; who urged us in The Female Eunuch to emulate ‘the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage’; who describes men in The Whole Woman as immune to sartorial vanity, as admirably brief and efficient in their grooming, and as ruthlessly ...”

“... transgression, and an inspiring political allegory. ‘Of thine impenetrable Spirit,’ wrote Byron in his 1816 poem ‘Prometheus’, ‘Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,/A mighty lesson we inherit.’ Two years later, Shelley embarked on his long poetic drama Prometheus Unbound, which celebrated the Titan’s rebellion against Zeus as the ...”

“... odd of differently-minded critics to want to shut their ears to the poets’ words about it. If Byron and Browning (on whom Lennard is acutely provocative) were reachable by ouija board, it would be perverse of us to refuse to hear whether they would assent to an interpretation of their work – with oui and ja (the etymology after all) – or whether we ...”

“... end of the 18th century thinness was more or less permanently in. A fat Romantic was anathema, as Byron, who constantly battled with his weight, knew. Even royalty could not escape the pressure for a youthful silhouette. The immensely vain George IV found that the glass of fashion would not flatter him as it had Henry VIII, for he lived in an age when ...”

“... sovereign Belgium’ came into existence in 1815, although here he is in distinguished company: Byron refers to ‘Belgium’s capital’ in the third canto of Childe Harold. If Pitt’s career during the last eight years of his life was in decline, he remained the master of the House of Commons. When he sat down in November 1797 after what a contemporary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the other hand, are attempts at comic epic. Written in emulation of Ariosto, and in homage to Byron, Ko is a world series of cartoonish adventures: the hero is a Japanese baseball player; the villain wishes to control the world’s dogs. ‘What I found in Ariosto was a poetry that was all action,’ Koch said. ‘There’s almost no reflection in the ...”

“... direction.’ Maybe the will to live and the wish to die share the same obscure origins. I suspect Byron was saying something like this, as well as writing from his own depression, when, in Don Juan, he says that ‘life’s strange principle will often lie/Deepest in those who long the most to die.’ The mystery is there, too, in the loneliness of the ...”

“... system of proportion to which all in his office alluded but no one could explain. When Robert Byron wrote his fine articles for Country Life in 1931 commemorating the achievement at New Delhi he noted that the meeting of classicism and the Orient was ‘a fusion, not of historical reminiscences, but of two schools of architectural thought. The outcome of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the contemporary writers ...”