“... and the will was found to be a complex one, and Byronic literature made the most of the fact. Byron himself is a dab hand at suggesting the real feeling that lies behind the assumed one, a ‘real feeling’ necessarily called in question by the fact that the revealer is revealing it. The Rousseau point of view – you may not need to know this but I need ...”

“... that is guilty. It invites the mild dismay of a poet to whom Hartman is prudently indifferent, Byron: ‘I wish he would explain his explanation.’ Yet it was Coleridge whom Byron was scorning there, and Hartman would not mind being tarred with the same brush as so myriad-minded a critic. But then again Coleridge ...”

“... remove repetition and ‘padding’. The padding removed includes Wilson’s first exchange with Byron and her earliest literary venture, a translation of Molière’s Malade imaginaire, which she tried unsuccessfully to get produced, despite her theatrical connections. Blanch has also altered the punctuation and chopped the narrative into chapters. It seems ...”

“... remained the poems that mattered most, as they were not slow to say. With the exception of Byron, it is difficult to think of any other English poet who became so well known so swiftly; and, like Byron, Auden inhabited the myth of himself uncomfortably. His celebrity among contemporaries was already established while ...”

“... It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his love of words. If he found words fascinating – their sounds, their peculiar symmetries and associations, their chimes, rhymes, assonances and quiddities – then he was likely to prove the real thing ...”

“... just an act. Some of the best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very ...”

“... defined with more clarity and force. Carretta’s George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron has a clearly identified subject but does not completely work as a book. This is not for want of appeal and variety in the matter. George III figured prominently in the literary and visual satire of his time. The range of themes evoked and preoccupations ...”

“... love There be a dearer name. Sibling relations also took more explicitly sexual forms. Rumours of Byron’s intimacy with his half-sister Augusta were confirmed after his death, but during his lifetime his relationship with her seemed to him stronger and more authentic than any of his other relationships with women. She bound him to his origins. Like ...”

“... reads Paul Muldoon will be dazzled by his linguistic exuberance. He follows the lead of Pope and Byron, engaging in many of the displays of wit that they engage in, particularly an exotic vocabulary and inventive rhyme. He loves terms of art, slang, botanical names, the names of foodstuffs and fabrics, rare words, proper names and place names. His poems send ...”

“... dead, butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread. With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite. That’s two peers already, of a sort, and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit, whose galleries once ran beneath this plot, causes the distinguished dead to drop into the ...”

“... dislike him, just because on those terms of art there is nothing there to dislike. Beside Ewart, Byron, and Kingsley Amis, look like shy dreamers, confiding in the reader their sense of themselves as essentially regular fellows, but doing it in such a way that he can look down on them for it, or at least patronise. Keats sighed to write what he thought ...”

“... by writers. The Prelude was avowedly autobiographical; and Macaulay, reviewing a Life of Byron in 1831, wrote: ‘He was himself the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry – the hero of every tale – the chief object of every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as ...”

“... and background, and secondly, taste in poetry. Pushkin, who had been introduced to the work of Byron in his South Russian exile, initially and for a long time adored him. Keats, though he spoke enthusiastically about Byron and quoted him with ease, did not. He had to endure the irritation of being mentioned in the same ...”

“... Byron’s Problem When they come up to you, as you’re sitting quietly, and lay their fat boobs on your knees, and look into your eyes with their own big eyes and wistfully caress your cheek and so, without speaking, say ‘Please!’ it’s a clear invitation to come out and play and you can’t just tell them to go away! When the wine’s round and they press up against you gently, it’s much like a musicless waltz as they talk about books (and they all write books) – that’s foreplay, nothing else, my son, true sex; it’s the talking that’s false! But you can’t make a snarky and sharpish riposte, with words like ‘Forget it!’, ‘Get lost!’ When they stroke your hair too, and finger your coat slyly, or lay a neat hand on your shirt, they all cast you as Faust (and they all know Faust), each one’s a Gretchen, maiden, pure; but they all want your hand up their skirt ...”

“... Apt phrases from T.S. Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant energy, which conveys, above all, that literature matters and that it also matters to ...”