“... lame blacksmith Hephaestus, the wounded foot and compensating talents of Chiron, Philoctetes, Byron and Edmund Wilson). The move from four animal to two human feet is the move to humanity standing upright, to the use of the hand (art) that we purchase at the price of the wounded foot (or, in our day, chronic lower back pain). Some, but not all, of ...”

“... morals and his versification in a series of spirited letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Byron swam against a tide of Romantic scorn, issuing his own poetic commandments in Don Juan: ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;/Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.’ And in the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, a ...”

“... of just about any poet you care to name – Milton, Pope, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas ... Graves also has an infuriating habit of rewriting other people’s poems – and even the whole of David Copperfield – to bring them closer to what he feels the White Goddess had in ...”

“... of posthumous decoration, for instance. To a few SOE bellet-rists he has become a would-be Lord Byron of Bulgaria: the poems, a high prose vein, even flamboyance (which he never had), oh, you know. To a diminishing huddle of elderly lefties – ‘pinkly-wrinklies’, I’m told – he remains an emblem of anti-Fascism. And there is of course Churchill’s ...”

“... often homely precision and clarity into an equal precision of dream-like beauty and melancholy. Byron’s interest was much more local, centring on the incestuous figures and the guilty lovers. Guilt meant nothing to Shelley, but to the Scotch Calvinist latent in Byron it meant a great deal, and in his translation of the ...”

“... the different recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos and their relative merits. He quoted from Byron and from Shakespeare. He was a man of culture and knowledge and I was impressed. Although I was terrified of these daily interrogations, as they came to be, I comforted myself that Viktor was a civilised man and that as long as I did not accept their ...”

“... there is the neo-Gothic Romance which takes as its focus the Byronic figure of Aubrey Bohun. If Byron had not died at Missolonghi, but had decided a few years after the Battle of Navarino to return in state to Newstead Abbey, he would presumably have created the same stir in the neighbourhood as Aubrey Bohun returning from Greece to the castle of his ...”

“... travestied the title role in Mazeppa, or The Wild Horse of Tartary, an atrocious adaptation after Byron. She was carried out of it when she died in Paris in 1868 after a whirlwind career not short on literary friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady ...”

“... he admired were those who provided the inspiration for many of Verdi’s librettos: Schiller, Byron, Victor Hugo and, beyond them, Shakespeare. For Mazzini, the Marchese Di Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos was the archetype of liberal values, and Verdi’s liberalism found its most memorable and direct expression in the great duet between Posa and Philip ...”

“... as outcasts. Crisp was first an outcast and then a star; Oscar Wilde went the other way, while Byron was both at the same time. Whatever the experience of individuals, the essence of bohemia as an idea, which is Wilson’s real subject, is a critique of middle-class values, a love-hate relationship between inside and out in which each needs the other to ...”

“... waning; his mind crowded with ethnographic trivia – to understand why he, more than anyone since Byron, lends himself so enthusiastically to romanticisation. Kennedy means to demystify a character who has become a poster-boy for idiosyncrasy. You will find only brief mention of Burton’s engaging exploits here – for these, Fawn Brodie’s The Devil Drives ...”

“... Shelley’s Frankenstein, Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’, Byron’s ‘Darkness’). One of the ways of investigating long-ago eruptions is by looking at the density of sulphate deposits buried deep under the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice core data also show evidence of a colossal (vei 6) eruption six years ...”

“... diabolic Castlereagh figure ‘tossed’ the dogs ‘human hearts to chew’. In the same year, Byron set out Castlereagh’s misanthropic and authoritarian vision of the world in Don Juan: States to be curb’d, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made – Cobbling at manacles for all mankind – A tinkering slave-maker, who mends ...”

“... Pollitt told him, wasn’t to write about it but to ‘go and get killed, comrade – we need a Byron in the movement.’) The No. 1 Company went to Lopera with 145 men, and returned to Albacete in January with 67. There they were reorganised, along with a few hundred new recruits, into the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade. The British ...”

“... This select brotherhood was heavily into male bonding, arcane causes and Wordsworth and Shelley (Byron was too worldly and cynical). They wrote poetry themselves and communicated via interminable letters about the meaning of life and the problem of how to act in order to realise the self and redeem the world. But in Tennyson’s day the Apostles didn’t hop ...”