“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christian variations, but it still has a history two centuries long, beginning, Lynskey says, when Byron ‘killed the whole world’ in his poem ‘Darkness’:       The world was void,The populous and the powerful was a lump,Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.But what was inaugurated by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”