“... to someone who had failed in a classy form of shoplifting. The letters are haunted by Napoleon and Byron to much the same degree as are the writings of Stendhal and Pushkin, and Byron’s account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more ...”

“... English painters – Lawrence, Wilkie, Bonington and Constable – and took subjects from Scott, Byron and Shakespeare. While others crossed the Alps to see Rome, Delacroix crossed the Channel to England, and rather liked it (although he did think he might have liked Italy better). And yet his temperament and his way of life were shaped by social ...”

“... he had listened to his gifted mother reading Gibbon when he was a boy; he preceded and survived Byron, Shelley and Keats. He outlived Enthusiasm and revolution, sat through the quarrels of Reform, went on to consider the doubts of Matthew Arnold and the euphoria of the Great Exhibition, and listened to all arguments with a satirist’s joy in dispute. A ...”

“... have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded of Balfour’s remark about ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... David. But why the broads latch on to the one bloke Remains what it has always been, a riddle. Byron though famous was both fat and broke While Casanova was a standing joke, His wig awry, forever on the fiddle. Mozart made Juan warble but so what? In Don Giovanni everybody sings. The show would fall flat if the star did not And clearly he’s not meant to ...”

“... all that they have an oddly desultory quality. It’s telling that Southey’s best parodist was Byron: good parody usually involves fellow-feeling, and something in Southey evidently chimed with Byron’s abiding sense of the ultimate frivolity of writing poetry at all; though where ...”

“... the author’s letters, are poor things indeed compared with those of Coleridge, Keats and Byron. The political intrigue is low-key: the incident when a drunken dragoon called Scolfield wandered into William Hayley’s garden at Felpham and ended up accusing Blake of sedition is nothing but a botch-up; it doesn’t have the wonderfully representative ...”

“... which he describes, not once but many times, as the military paradigm. The author calls Byron in aid. ‘What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dress, their banners and their art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.’ It hardly needed ...”

“... characteristic of Tucker’s approach, in this connection, that among literary influences that of Byron is slighted in favour of ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats’; Tennyson, Tucker solemnly informs us, read Byron at Somersby before he encountered these other more significant figures, and ‘subsequently ...”

“... Moreover, he was a survivor from the beginning of the century, ‘a contemporary of Hazlitt and Byron’ (as Michael Collie puts it), and the Pre-Raphaelites particularly liked that period. Also, he was still big and strong and handsome. Watts-Dunton boasted of his acquaintance: ‘Those East Anglians who have bathed with him on the east coast, or others ...”

“... Some writers are as interesting to read about as to read: writers such as Byron, Wilde, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and D.H. Lawrence, who saw their lives as extensions of their art and in many cases set out to shape their own time as well as to describe it in their work. Others, of similar ambition but more modest talent, defined their age as much through the defects of their work as its merits, and what they wrote increases in historical density as it loses literary freshness, becoming a kind of stratigraphic layer in an archaeological dig ...”

“... The literary career of Isidore Ducasse, successor to Sade, Byron and Baudelaire and a model for Rimbaud, Jarry and the Surrealists, has been virtually a posthumous one. It has been chronically complicated furthermore by obsessions with the lacunae of his biography, as well as with the interpretation of the two names, Lautréamont and Maldoror, the first of which is a mystery and the second an enigma ...”

“... the terms of the ‘Family Compact’ between France and Spain. 21 June 1764: Commodore John Byron sets sail in HMS Dolphin, HMS Tamar accompanying, to visit ‘His Majesty’s Islands call’d Falkland’s and Pepys ‘Islands situate in the Atlantick Ocean near The Streights of Magellan in order to make better surveys thereof, than had yet been ...”

“... certain privileged social groups – in effect, the licence of the lawless aristocrat. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the aristocrat and the anarchist have always been secret bedfellows. If the English love a character, they also love a lord, which is one reason Byron (who was literally an aristocrat) and Wilde (who was ...”