“... susceptibility to the Third Reich went beyond naive delusion. Or, as the travel writer Robert Byron said to him, ‘the trouble with you, Chips, is that you put your adopted class before your adopted country.’After Chamberlain gave his guarantee to Poland in March 1939, and even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact opened the way for the German invasion of ...”

“... when he is read a piece of overblown writing on the subject of Ireland. Soon he is quoting Byron. And not long after that he is giving ‘vent to a hopeless groan’ and crying ‘Shite and onions’ before putting on his hat and announcing: ‘I must get a drink after that.’But at this point the real world, or the world of Simon Dedalus’s ...”

“... in the Design Museum. I am reading The Man who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas by Byron Rogers, whose book on J.L. Carr I read here on holiday last year. R.S. Thomas, the poetry of whom I scarcely know, sounds as bleak as Larkin pretended to be. A huge hawk hovers high above the house. It doesn’t fly off but just drifts upwards, and is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”