“... 1991). Its only natural frontier with Asia is the strip of water once swum by Leander and Lord Byron. To the north, plain and steppe unroll without break into Turkestan. Cultural borders are no more clearly marked than geographical: Muslim Albania or Bosnia lie a thousand miles west of Christian Georgia or Armenia, where the Ancients set the dividing-line ...”

“... a ‘Life’ than merely with ‘life’. Or this can be put another way. Poets like Milton, or Byron, are exceptions; most poets, being ‘inward’, don’t do that much actual living – or, as Pope said, ‘contemplative life is not only my scene, but it is my habit too.’ In the Introductory chapter to his intelligent, stimulating study, Pope’s ...”

“... Goethe found it ‘morally salutary to be living in the midst of a sensual people’. In Italy, Byron decided, ‘there is no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.’ Stendhal, who knew the country better, felt at times that ‘music alone is alive in Italy, and all that is to be made in this beautiful land is ...”

“... of life’. In another’s fate the critic-stung Shelley now wept his own. For Shelley’s friend Byron, already prepared to feel contempt, it was irresistibly amusing to think that the little Cockney ‘mankin’ who had once idolised him ‘should let itself be snuffed out by an Article’ from a hostile critic.Keats seems to have been unusually vulnerable ...”