“... poetry even as they deplored the politics, which they saw simply as a biographical circumstance. Byron lost patience with The Excursion, which he thought turgid, but captured the problem with perfect succinctness: ‘Wordsworth – stupendous genius! damned fool!’The fact remains that Wordsworth wrote most of his best verse in the 1790s, certainly before ...”

“... reflected in their different ways the tendencies which in the larger island were to produce Byron as well as Burns. The rhetoric of sexual celebration, of ironic and discursive epic, of consciously ludicrous classical invocation, of oscillation between Gothic satire and Gothic horror, were so pointedly marked in their work as to induce anguish in the ...”

“... reciprocal barbs of Mr Grigson’s contemporaries with the corresponding performances of Pope or Byron. Mr Grigson has modestly left himself out. But his own scatterings of spleen are among the richer moments of an art in decline, and in one or two poems (‘Committed, or Mr Yeats and Mr Logue’, or ‘Birth of Criticism’) he has preserved some traces of ...”

“... I have seemed inordinately to go on,’ the reaction is not, as it is with Pushkin, or Byron, or Fuller, ‘No, not at all,’ but: ‘Yes, perhaps you have.’ This kind of performance requires the irony of an internal dialogue, the more so if the subject is autobiographical. The two sides of Waterman’s manner are a lofty, polysyllabic address ...”

“... women who were not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in ...”

“... the Swedish fucking K rifle. It was about cutting a figure’ – a phrase Keats applies to Byron, and with something of the same distaste. Wolff may be in search of his identity, but he’s had his fill of figure-cutting, which is why he concludes the episode by refusing a dramatically appropriate gesture of revenge, the destruction of Landon’s prize ...”

“... the greater ode, blank verse or, as a regular practice, standard English. You can’t overdo what Byron termed Burns’s antithetical mind: ‘tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used ...”

“... when his mother chose to compete for the ardour of two of Caroline’s most famous paramours, Byron and Michael Bruce. Yet his emotional dependence and lack of ruthlessness prevented him from leaving her until his family pushed him into a separation in 1825. Jibes about his subordination to women probably had a permanently damaging effect on him; perhaps ...”

“... eight hundred pages, probably contains more vocatives than Swinburne and more ejaculations than Byron. Fraser’s uncritical attitude to his subject’s works goes hand in hand with a nit-picking thoroughness about the facts of his life: we are told at one point that ‘Barker stayed in British Columbia for almost exactly one calendar month.’ At every ...”

“... of privileged murderers and robbers whose impunity has been the consecration of crime’. Byron, too, would have passed the test despite an ancestor having fought on the Royalist side at Marston Moor. He was not an admirer of kings, and he thought Cromwell both ‘the sagest of usurpers’ and an ‘immortal rebel’. Macaulay himself thought that ...”

“... collected works is the posthumously published Les Tables tournantes de Jersey, in which Racine, Byron and Shakespeare figure among the writers who come and shoot the breeze with Hugo (Shakespeare admits that English is inferior to French). One discussion begins with Hugo asking Chénier: – Is something bothering you? (silence) – Are you still ...”

“... Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life ...”

“... expressed both Thayer’s aesthetic lushness – Adolf Dehn portrayed him in a caricature as ‘le Byron de nos jours’ – and his monkish severity. At one point he started inviting contributors over one at a time after each contribution; Moore thought this was ‘a killing thing’. A nervous, mercurial creature, Thayer was described by his ...”

“... the myth of failure first promoted by Clough’s well-meaning friends. But unlike his precursors Byron and Goethe, Clough declined to romanticise his disenchantments. There was no need, when they possessed attractions of their own: ‘To move on angels’ wings were sweet;/But who would therefore scorn his feet?’ This didn’t stop others doing it for ...”

“... Two Minds: Received Visions’, composed of ten (Shakespearean) sonnets with comic rhyme. It’s Byron via the Cole Porter songbook:He dreams another life, another guise    She dreams her lover is the young John KeatsShe dreams of singles bars she used to cruise    He dreams of being the late, and later, YeatsShe dreams of next week’s secret ...”