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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Desertion’ or ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ – could not be more different from the poems of Byron that are the first great works in English in that stanza: ‘Beppo’, ‘A Vision of Judgment’, Don Juan – though here again it might be said that Yeats’s insistent use of off-rhyme almost transforms the stanzaic rules. Then there is the sonnet ...”

“... left of him, but it was not the fault of Holland House, which could be walked away from, as Byron proved. There is a crushing sort of determinism which tries to make social élites responsible for the corruption of artists. In fact, it is up to the artist. In our own time, T. S. Eliot received a lot of abuse from Dr Leavis for attending cocktail parties ...”

“... went. It’s not clear how much this group, chaired by Lord Derwent and including the young Robert Byron, knew of Goldring’s activities as a pacifist and left-wing ‘propaganda novelist’. However, a working relationship was never achieved and Goldring took his leave as soon as the group was established and ready – having initially refused to associate ...”