“... to mime the subject but Shelley sustains the momentum of the stanza only with some awkwardness. (Byron had the same problem in Childe Harold, which may be why he switched to ottava rima for Don Juan.) And the interposition of the long Alexandrine poses an obstacle to propelling the poem on from stanza to stanza. But within a decade, Shelley had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... composed’). Now and then Teskey courts a criticism that he wittily borrows from Byron on Coleridge – ‘Explaining metaphysics to the nation/I wish he would explain his Explanation’ – but his book is an interesting reaffirmation in today’s often contrary academic climate of a poetic approach to Milton, swiping at those who would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... found it hard to change his mind. In Seven Types he remarked that it was only in Don Juan that Byron escaped from his infantile incest-fixation on his half-sister, ‘which was till then all he had got to say’. Later he added a note to say he now understood that Byron did not meet Augusta till he was grown up (till he ...”

“... enthusiasm and the most significant phase of Orientalist scholarship were over. In 1813, Byron had advised Thomas Moore: ‘Stick to the East … it [is] the only poetical policy.’ The ‘policy’ had impelled Byron, Southey and Moore to write about the gul-e-bulbul (the stock Persian metaphor for the ...”

“... the natural prey of the rowing club but avoided having his sheets shredded when his friend Robert Byron repelled the would-be invaders, who ‘fell like nine pins before a barrage of champagne bottles flung … from a strategic position at the head of the stairs with a force and precision that radically changed the pattern of Oxford rowing for the rest of the ...”

“... in the technique of verse’, and regretted that he was ‘aping the antics of Kipling and Byron’. It is a mark of the division in Read that he was both attracted and repelled by those whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and ...”

“... the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. For Marcus, as for Byron, the ‘rest’ comes with the writing, where the original moments of intensity and truth are recovered in a mode recognised to be minor. But the fate of loss and diminishment secures its romantic revenge, as we see repeatedly in Marcus’s book. He calls ...”

“... frustratingly underdeveloped and short on illustration. Dan Jacobson’s subjects range from Byron to Isaac Babel, from Theodore Herzl the Zionist to the South African Olive Schreiner, and also include some mordant reflections on a D.H. Lawrence conference at Sante Fe and a note on the biblical genesis of his own novel The Rape of Tamar. There ...”

“... than life, or that the criticism of Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man is poetry to be read alongside Byron and Blake, or that literature, as a function of class oppression, is a burden from which we must all be set free. ‘For him the insides of books are ... things like those in his own life, real or imagined, real angers, joys, and disgraces, taking place in ...”

“... any number of authors more interested in embodying linguistic difference in their writing: Sterne, Byron, Joyce, Gadda, Amelia Rosselli. The closest point of comparison is probably Christine Brooke-Rose, whose novel Between, published in 1968, inhabits the consciousness of a simultaneous interpreter who – like so many of Marani’s characters – is ...”

“... there suddenly, she was impressed and happy that he was living in New York City.’ In ‘Billy Byron’, a tennis prodigy is visited by a spirit he calls Walter, who gives him the ability to anticipate the direction of the ball ‘with unusual accuracy’. Several of the stories begin at swanky dinners or cocktail parties where accounts of ghost sightings ...”

“... to Canada after the heiress debacle; ambitiously, Claire Clairmont, the glamorous young mother of Byron’s daughter, who liked Peacock but thought him feckless and idle. His oddest courtship was aimed at Jane Gryffydh, to whom he abruptly proposed by letter in 1819 after failing to make contact at all over the previous eight years. The marriage took place in ...”