“... its private form. That in one sense was the objection of many of his most critical contemporaries. Byron, who seems to have been no great admirer of the earlier ‘unexcised’ Wordsworth who ‘seasoned his pedlar poems with democracy’, is even harder on the Stamp Distributor for Westmoreland which he became in 1813. By the time of Don Juan his name is an ...”

“... Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though he never actually met any of them – whether through shyness or negligence or something else is not clear. Dickens called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a ...”

“... themselves in the presence of Maria Theresa at least’. She sketches highlights in the saga of Byron, Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke and Augusta Leigh, from her first sight of Byron – ‘his countenance is fine when it is in repose, but the moment it is in play, suspicious, malignant and consequently ...”

“... by associating them with the morals and behaviour of a class who were not quite gentlemen. Byron (not quoted by Cox) goes to the root of the matter with the forceful impartiality characteristic of a man wholly confident of his own social status. ‘The grand distinction of the Under forms of the New School of poetry is their vulgarity. By this I do not ...”

“... many of them and remained capable of gratitude? Of course he is cheating a bit, to leave out Lord Byron, whom he once called ‘master of the airy manner’. Byron’s lightness and grace echo in Auden’s own later work, and help to make him the absolute master of airy, civilised verse in our own day. In a time of high if ...”

“... it forever, snug as a treasure carefully packed for shipment to a distant museum. And I think of Byron staring into the flames near the water’s edge, and of what he wrote afterward to Moore, ‘… all of Shelley was consumed but for the heart.’ Wherever you are – in the open chest of the accusatory martyr who leaned toward me one day in an Italian ...”

“... the other. He was also a perceptive critic, who did much to champion the work of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and – eventually – Wordsworth; less brilliant than Hazlitt, he was also less envious of the brilliance of others, which meant that his critical enthusiasm was more generous and open-handed. This isn’t to say that Hunt didn’t possess his ...”

“... of our desire to go beyond ourselves. The impulse for ‘Madoc’ came from a selection of Byron that Muldoon made for his American publishers. (One finds oneself adopting this rather unlikely preterite and literary-historical tone, partly because the poem is a conundrum and cries out for a methodical approach; and partly for want of a strong or ...”

“... and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and surface throughout Byron’s poetry. Further afield, a work like Heart of Darkness, whose expatriate Polish author was raised a devout Roman Catholic, could easily fill an exhaustive inventory of the features that Manning believes to be distinctive of the ...”

“... to depict Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the safe romantic hues of retrospection. Tom Moore, as Byron had noted, ‘loved a Lord’, and also loved the fleshpots of Holland House. Byron himself, shrewdly aware of any promising subject for fashionably romantic exploitation, had seen that Lord Edward’s life would ‘make ...”

“... I. As well as books of Orthodox theology, Njegos’s library contains Russian translations of Byron and Thomas Gray. In Dalmatia and Montenegro, published in 1848, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, an English traveller to Montenegro, described how Njegos impressed his guests by shooting down a lemon thrown into the air, adding that this was ‘a singular ...”

“... with its adventurism, its gaudy clothes, its playing to the radical gallery, is often compared to Byron’s. But isn’t the touch of sadism in Disraeli’s letter to his nervous widow, with its punitive use of the idea of genius, its deployment of candour as another strategy, entirely the opposite of Byron? Apart from the ...”

“... not go on to Eton. He could be a belligerent child, and once pulled the ears of the 11- year-old Byron. Byron retaliated by throwing shells at him and broke a window. Even as a boy, the legendary daredevil was not to be messed about. Years later, however, Byron testified to ...”

“... de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an autobiography’. Then there’s the private myth about Byron: ‘I still feel the same liking, the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first mistress. ‘Hugo ...”

“... and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or less abandoned her. Percy Shelley had been fond of the child: ‘with me/She was a special favourite,’ he wrote in ...”