“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... even howling at deaths. Not just symbols of human virtue, but superior sensibilities (as the young Byron insisted in his epitaph to Boatswain, his Newfoundland dog and ‘one friend’), dogs became fit matter for poetry. Although these new ways of anthropomorphising animals were evidence of a more sceptical or secular mentality – ‘anthropomorphism’ had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one. Byron, Don Juan For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten ...”

“... ploughs and rivulets, of commemoration and inner vexation and outward joy. We may imagine Auden or Byron, Pope or Muldoon sighing when Heaney calls poetry, in general, ‘a ratification of the impulse towards transcendence’. We may even wonder how ‘Punishment’ fits that bill; but that is what many of Heaney’s poems – and not only the recent poems ...”

“... the black stains left on my handkerchiefs.In the Romantic age, fog was mocked but also celebrated. Byron, in Don Juan, proposed the metropolis as ‘a huge dun cupola, like a foolscap crown/On a fool’s head – and there is London town’. Literary description of fog became an enjoyable duty for visiting writers. So, too, did dramatic pen-pictures of the ...”

“... A generation of great actors met a generation of great critics, including Hazlitt, Coleridge and Byron, and the London theatre was a centre of literary and intellectual life as never before or since. In an auditorium without dimmable lights or sound amplification, everything depended on intense intimacy between players and audience. Drury ...”

“... was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow inmate, Byron Booth, in January 1969. They had hijacked a plane to Cuba and joined up with Cleaver. Not long after sending Cleaver off to Algiers, the Cubans packed off Rahim and Booth too.Cleaver told me that Rahim had stolen the Panthers’ money and was planning to ...”

“... which was a favourite method in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘No man,’ according to Byron, ‘ever took a razor in hand who did not at some time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life.’ The advent of the safety razor inhibited such morbidity. It is unlikely that anyone has ever held a Bic disposable in his hand and ...”

“... not include, at the expense of the Essay on Man, more of the late, no-punches-pulled satires which Byron so admired). On the contemporary scene in general Paulin is gloomy. He laments that the popular tradition of political poetry is almost dead, but here the voice of the Faber Poet prevails over the politically engaged writer: the landscape is not as bleak as ...”