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“... looked on as electricity was applied to the bodies of dead animals. They twitched terrifyingly. (Mary Shelley attended such a demonstration before writing Frankenstein.) At some demonstrations the heads of decapitated dogs convulsed. At others, cicadas sang. The effects of electricity on human corpses were also demonstrated, or performed. Fraudsters ...”

“... the game to a literary scene, one would have no trouble at all with the later Romantics – Byron, Shelley, Keats. Among the older generation, Blake and Coleridge might be a little more difficult. Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and ...”

“... most things. He was an angry man with a cheerful disposition. ‘All through his short life Shelley loved bizarre happenings and unpredictable human behaviour, so he would have enjoyed himself a lot at Windsor Girls School on 22 June.’ ( On 22 June 1985 there was a Shelley conference at Windsor Girls School.) In ...”

“... The poems in this volume will not persuade anyone to care for Shelley who does not do so already: they are often bad, sometimes dreadful, juvenile works which Shelley wrote between the ages of 17 and 22. These years, from 1809 to 1814, were the most chaotic of his life; he tried to make his own fate but succeeded chiefly in precipitating a series of disasters ...”

“... looked at’. At this point, Colley turns to Frankenstein, or rather to her own take on whether Mary Shelley modelled the monster or Frankenstein himself on Napoleon. It’s an old speculation, and Colley’s answer is: both. ‘At one level, Napoleon is clearly an inspiration for the monster … an unnatural, increasingly violent creature who ...”

“... the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content ...”

“... of water.’ A villa was built on the site of the spring near Como in the 16th century. Percy and Mary Shelley tried to stay there in 1818; it’s now a luxury hotel. The spring ‘runs under the building’, according to Dunn, visible from a window ‘on an otherwise unremarkable corridor’. Having retired from the sewers, Pliny argued his last major ...”

“... the dead, and praying to those who, purified in the fires of the afterlife, could now ask God and Mary to reprieve those still suffering for their sins, and help us ahead of time for ours. But when this eschatological perspective weakened, the activity of the dead didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to ...”

“... compilation chapter Caroline Lamb falls for Byron, and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and ...”

“... provisional government led by Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a Pisa-based intellectual and confidant of Mary Shelley who had disembarked at Messolonghi the year before with only his personal fortune and a printing press. The Etaireia had by this time virtually disappeared as an organising force. The Greeks had realised that this version of their cause was not ...”

“... proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched between the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the mainline railway and St Pancras Coroner’s Court. ‘Listing’ has done little to ...”

“... furious egotism of his contemporaries. For Ellis, Byron’s meeting and brief companionship with Shelley and his entourage marks the summer of 1816 as a transition in his life. Yet Byron in Geneva makes us wonder whether there really are turning points in people’s lives, or rather obscure evolutions punctured and punctuated by crises. Leslie Marchand, in ...”

“... English Romantics to Byron’s Swiss villa in 1816 – the ‘year without a summer’ – where Mary Shelley channelled a widespread perception of nature in chaos to write Frankenstein. In his new book, Sam White adds the mishaps and muddles of American colonisation to the rap sheet. Most early colonial ventures, he argues, failed because they were ...”

“... 15th-century poem, a lament over women’s perpetual drudgery. His extract from the early feminist Mary Astell, writing in 1721, acknowledges that by comparison with Eastern women, who ‘are born Slaves, and live Prisoners all their Lives’, Englishwomen have an easy servitude, but ‘Fetters of Gold are still Fetters.’ By 1839 there was a ‘Female ...”

“... appeared on his plate that he hadn’t expected he would simply dump it onto the tablecloth. (In Shelley Rohde’s biography there is an account of a Royal Academy dinner where, angered by some of his fellow members’ lack of regard for him, he ate his way through a tureen charged with potatoes which he had persuaded a waiter to place in front of him.) He ...”