“... between sensation and idea. Whether to his friend Kinnaird, or his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote as if talking, although there is a touch of Hazlitt in his comparison of Augusta and himself to Paolo and Francesca, ‘whose case fell a good deal short of ours – though sufficiently naughty’. Wordsworth by contrast has an odd unnatural ...”

“... skilfully weaves the friends – Connolly, Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Brian Howard, Robert Byron – into a completed composition, the others serve chiefly to start a scene or two and swell the progress of Waugh himself. Of course this gives a misleading picture of period and individuals, but that is in a sense the object of the exercise, for the ...”

“... tour de force Balzac invokes Cuvier, the ‘greatest poet of the century’ – greater even than Byron. The palaeontologist’s conception of the past has the effect of making us ‘lose our footing in the present’. Again and again in 19th-century literature we are reminded of the vertiginous prospects opened up behind, beneath and before us by students of ...”

“... book, but it may not be long before the Ottoman Empire becomes part of the EEC: what would Byron – he appears on the dust-jacket in Albanian national costume – have made of that? Rupert Christiansen’s Romantic Affinities is a very different affair – a guide to an age, inspired apparently by an understandable fit of summer glooms on marking ...”

“... correspondents have both a hunger for experience and the itch to communicate it: one remembers Byron, attending in Rome the beheading of three robbers, sitting near the front with his opera-glass trained on the spectacle, and insisting in the letter written hot on the heels of the event that one should ‘see everything, once’. This wasn’t Hardy’s ...”

“... and was much impressed by its enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He observed that ‘in Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs’: it appears that, where England is concerned, things haven’t changed in that respect. Not that he was uncritical: the student corps, with their drunkenness and ...”

“... Sally Festing is embarrassed by Gertrude Jekyll’s social snobbery. The result is like a life of Byron written by someone who would rather not mention sex. Gertrude Jekyll’s sense of social distinction was as finely developed as her sense of smell, and almost as useful in her career. She never shared Morris’s enthusiasm for the working classes and ...”

“... US current affairs TV show, Sixty Minutes, and by New York Magazine, whose reporter Christopher Byron accuses those who take Coleman seriously of ‘chipping away at America’s faith in her institutions’. David Leppard, who has never explained the contradictions between the articles he published in 1989 and his 1991 book on the subject, wrote recently in ...”

“... dried up except for the occasional selective bounty bestowed by such notably successful authors as Byron and Dickens on their less fortunate or less gifted fellows. Beginning about 1830, Grub Street became an outpost of Fleet Street. Day-to-day journalism, not to be confused with the ‘higher’ variety, was an honest way of making a living, but until late in ...”

“... The first explicit allusion, half a dozen pages into the novel, comes when Jamie reflects from Byron: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence. ‘He picked up the coffee-pot. By Byron’s standards, he was not a man.’ But is he even an existence? Twenty pages later, and now in ...”

“... actually suppresses some of the farce in episodes meant by their participants to recall what Byron spoke of as ‘the monstrous mummeries of the Middle Ages’. Citing the Champion of England’s ritual appearance at the Westminster Hall banquet attending George IV’s coronation in 1821, he neglects the fact that, instead of rising from the ground like ...”

“... he should have known, she thought, that the gunfire could not be heard from Brussels. (Byron had made the same mistake.) Detail isn’t always a good thing. In Austen, clothes, for example, are rarely described and when they are it tends to indicate a character’s Lydia Bennetness, but in Heyer everyone, even the sensible types, must have their ...”

“... his Russian grievances, only to be told this wasn’t appropriate. So it was, in the words of Lord Byron watching from a nearby rooftop, that ‘Bellingham was launched into eternity.’ Everyone – save, presumably, the prison chaplain – was impressed. ‘His deportment,’ the otherwise hostile Morning Post adjudged, ‘was calm, manly, and even at times ...”

“... a trace of the millennialism that had informed her anti-slavery. Although, in her notorious Lady Byron Vindicated, she explicitly criticised the English marriage laws that made the position of the married woman ‘in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave’, she, like Child, refused in the end to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan ...”

“... this book, it is not written by Southey, but (once Glover has got hold of them) by William Cowper, Byron, the sailor-satirist Edward Thompson, and the anonymous author of a splendid poem called ‘The Stage Coach’, much anthologised in the Georgian period. A few lines are quoted from each of these writers, and every single quotation contains one or more ...”