“... ascending order of stylistic finesse) in the literary ballads of Gilbert and of Thackeray and in Byron’s great orchestration of comedy and pathos in Canto Two of Don Juan. They are part, it might be said, of the cultural embarrassment: a domestication and a coming to terms, often archly elaborate in their wordiness. Perhaps the greatest of all the literary ...”

“... you will see and see with pleasure how much we agree. As for the eccentricities learned by Byron in Greece, they ‘would never separate me from any man I liked or was bound to’. While she emphasised her own ‘natural tastes’, she took the same liberal view of lesbianism: ‘What you speak of between women is utterly incomprehensible to me. As a ...”

“... expeditions to Greece and Anatolia. There were no German philhellenes to match Shelley and Byron, for whom the modern Greeks were live people, not the ethereal playthings they were for Hölderlin. Goethe turned down several invitations to visit Greece; he never intended to write a ‘Greek Journey’ to match his Italian Journey and thought he had ...”

“... writing on Shakespeare, there are wonderful remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is ...”

“... magic. I saw it a decade ago at the Royal Court, with Mark Rylance playing Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the big, impossible man who lives in a caravan in the woods and talks his heart out to strays and dropouts, meaning everything he says, loving everything he hears, living at a pitch of absolute charisma. As the play opens, Rylance-as-Rooster lopes over ...”

“... at Isfahan, inside the Sheikh Lutfullah mosque – whose ornamental richness was thought by Robert Byron to outstrip that of Versailles or the Doge’s Palace – Kaplan sees ‘a frightening beauty’, ‘authority without wisdom or balance’: ‘the calligraphy suggested such an overabundance of the word that language itself seemed to lose meaning ... This ...”

“... face now hangs in loose folds, like an elephant’s behind.’ The bons mots are reeled off. Byron is ‘a master not of language but of speed’. Nicolas Nabokov is ‘a composer who will never realise his talent because he cannot bear to be long enough alone’. ‘The steadiest business in the world would be a pharmacy next door to Stravinsky.’ Not ...”

“... and literary scholar but of a man of action. One needs to go back to Chaucer, Wyatt, Raleigh or Byron to find anything equivalent; and their lives were not nearly so various. Alldritt’s biography is briskly, even hurriedly, written in a kind of literary journalism that is serviceable and occasionally not quite that. The author has written a biography of ...”

“... hesitations, interruptions – but without finality. Its nearest equivalent, in this respect, is Byron’s Don Juan, another triumph of digressiveness. ‘I meant it for a poetical Tristram Shandy,’ Byron said of his great comic poem, thinking of how it might be fitted around, and make material of, his life. Tristram ...”

“... In remote Carpathian Ruthenia, he had met yet another intrepid young woman reporter, Patricia Byron, who at 24 had already led an expedition to make a language map of the Congo. This liaison turned out to be permanent, a marriage which lasted until Cockburn’s death in 1981.The Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 stunned the world, knocking the bottom out of ...”

“... of labour based on sex’; Bachofen’s ‘mother right’ becomes ‘maternal right’; and Byron’s epigram, ‘Man’s love is of his life a thing apart; ’Tis woman’s whole existence,’ loses all its wit on the round trip from English to French and back again: ‘Byron rightly said that love is merely an ...”

“... toes up,/“It’s such a pity Wystan never grows up,”’ he complained in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Leavis wasn’t the only one who thought this way about Auden, but he was always the most damningly outspoken about Auden’s ‘very green immaturity’, and he thought something similar about Tennyson. Keats was good: in ‘To Autumn’, Leavis ...”

“... don’t pretend that I quite understand/My own meaning when I would be very fine,’ Byron said. There is good sense in the proposition that literary works often turn out different to what their originators thought they intended. That is, after all, only to say of writing what is true of any human action: intentions are a lot more complicated and ...”

“... through the running titles to the 1979 edition says it all: Browning Bunyan Burke Burns Butler Byron … and seventy pages of quotations from Shakespeare – though not, of course, any of the scurrilous apocryphal stuff like Manningham’s story about his sexual conquests. Later editions of the Oxford Dictionary belatedly got with the programme. They began ...”

“... with the story of the philhellenes rather than with the Greeks themselves. But for Mazower, Byron and the others are almost a sideshow to what was happening in Greek villages and ports and encampments. The narration of the conflict presents certain challenges: the Greek Revolution produced no Napoleon or Garibaldi, no figure on whom its fortunes ...”