“... person already establishes in the public’s mind some relations between wild and tame: with Byron, for instance, or D. H. Lawrence, we are prepared to accept the wild elements as an important part of the picture. With Jane Austen, the public is much less eager or even inclined to imagine ‘wild’ elements. Yet Austen has her ‘wild’ side, and there ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... speeches from the dock and those in the House of Commons by Burdett and Alderman Matthew Wood and Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse (all MPs elected from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for advocating abstinence and celibacy against God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. To Byron, Parson Malthus was a sexual and religious hypocrite, preaching asceticism to others – ‘turning marriage into arithmetic’ – while arranging his own domestic affairs on a more congenial basis. The saddest testimony on the Essay’s power to erode ...”

“... Onegin. Characters take their cues from romantic fashions, and from writers like Scott, Pushkin, Byron, Rousseau and Marlinsky (a producer of Caucasian adventures and the most popular Russian novelist of the 1830s). This is how Pechorin is first described: He was of medium height and well proportioned; his slim waist and broad shoulders indicated a strong ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... actor, what enabled him to become one: that his films put him in the small company of those – Byron, Nijinsky, Valentino, the last Prince of Wales – with power over the sexual imaginations of millions. Like an incubus, the Olivier of the Thirties and Forties could enter the dreams of the young, the reveries of the less young, and bring them to ...”