“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... C.B.A. Behrens – a character out of Lermontov. Lermontov, for his part, was a character out of Byron, and so was Pechorin, the ‘hero of our time’ in Lermontov’s novel of 1839, one of those people ‘who are fated to attract all kinds of unusual things’. Pechorin is a cold-hearted, stylish fatalist, experimentalist, existentialist and divided man, a ...”

“... perceptions and prejudices by tracing the development of Balkan images in English literature from Byron through The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and beyond. It is thoroughly enjoyable to read and peppered with hilarious or hair-raising quotations from some of Britain’s most admired authors. A literary critic, Goldsworthy ...”

“... into ever shallower entries, perhaps to evade his admirers. I have just been reading Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, recently reissued with a nice introduction by Bruce Chatwin.† Byron’s splendid book is made rather than marred by his unrepentant snobbery. Chatwin, who travelled the same road thirty years ...”

“... He really believed that it was worth redeeming Trento and Trieste. He came to feel Shelley and Byron would have approved of Italy’s imperialist war, and he saw the Austria of 1914 (with its universal franchise which Britain still lacked) in terms of the black legend of literary liberalism. Trevelyan had swallowed hook, line and sinker the attitudes of ...”

“... of Mailer, Wolfe, Vidal, Buckley, Burroughs and Genet. The editors who followed Hayes, men like Byron Dobell and the late Don Erickson, carried on the tradition, ensuring that each new generation of editors understood that Esquire’s mandate was to remain on the cutting edge of journalism and literature. Although Hayes was long gone from Esquire by the ...”