“... less American in the world. ‘I’m sure God will send them to a different place from ONE & Lord Byron,’ she writes in a letter. When faced with the inconsistency of having some American friends, she protests: ‘But they live in Europe and have chosen freedom.’ Nevertheless, she deplores their presence there, always asking each other where they come ...”

“... since pig Latin. It can make any idiot sound unfathomable. ‘When a man talks of system,’ said Byron, ‘his case is hopeless.’ To the extent that they are systems, critical modes or methods are aberrations. They are usually ways for mediocrities to make themselves sound interesting. Occasionally a first-rate critic is to be found promoting a mode or ...”

“... several Weimar worthies, Giacomo Leopardi’s letters from Venice and the correspondence of Lord Byron’s circle in Pisa, including Teresa Guiccioli (with whom Andrew had a brief affair), have enabled Hildesheimer to make the book before us a definitive life, leaving relatively few factual gaps in the record. Motivation and the tremor within, on the other ...”

“... Spender off to fight in Spain, reportedly, so he could ‘get himself killed to give the party its Byron’.Spender’s capacity as a political thinker was never obvious, especially not to himself. Readers of all persuasions must have been as puzzled by his early explanation that ‘I am a communist because I am a liberal’ as by his later assertion that ...”

“... and the frequent comedy of his human shortcomings. After he is beaten up at school for preferring Byron to Tennyson, he returns home with torn clothes: ‘So his sufferings for his art began,’ Ellmann writes, which is satirical and yet not untrue. The conclusion to his first trip to Paris is similarly pitched: ‘As a last gesture he seems to have gone to a ...”

“... which tells of his attempt to keep afloat a magazine, the Liberal, under the sponsorship of Lord Byron – with an opening salvo against Byron’s hanger-on Tom Moore: I was sorry to find the other day, on coming to Vevey, and looking into some English books at a library there, that Mr Moore had taken an opportunity, in ...”

“... through the motions of teaching them, Lurie toys with the idea of writing a chamber opera about Byron’s love affair with the 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, which the poet began in Italy in 1819 after being ostracised in England for his scandalous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta. Lurie, too, has Byronic good looks and a Byronic sexual ...”

“... Hence Shakespeare, ‘our Father’, was a Romantic. Pushkin certainly came under the sway of Byron, but by the time he was at work on the later chapters of Eugene Onegin, he was having second thoughts. Though by the end of his life he had enough English to read some Wordsworth and Coleridge, his intellectual formation was most indebted either to ...”

“... took his wife and their sons to the South of France and Spain. Though his letters aren’t in the Byron league when it comes to exotic travel, they show a keen eye for the picturesque. To the Longleys, he wrote: ‘Swallows shit from the rafters all around me; our landlord sprays the vines out at the back.’ A teaching post at Berkeley also had a liberating ...”

“... poetical courage, dare their readers to be that cynical student in the back row, to be Byron or Shelley giggling as the old goat of Grasmere goes bleating on. In ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ you can hear exactly what J.K. Stephens meant when he said that Wordsworth had two ...”

“... George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid Blyton period. I sucked and sucked at books for the juice of vicarious experience ...”

“... unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It ...”

“... Burns’s separations did not go unremarked by his early readers. Another early reader was Byron, who was moved, by a private collection of Burns’s letters, to speak, not of his separations, but of his mixtures or convergences: ‘What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and ...”

“... Clutching his bear from Muscovy, esteemed the boxer’s fate, of Italic beauty dreaming lame Byron passed his student days. I remembered his distress – his swim across the Hellespont to lose some weight. But I have cooled toward his creations … so do forgive my unromantic side – to me the marble roses of a Keats have more charm than all those ...”

“... range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice could bring to the poems, and prompts you to consider how the poems might ...”