“... at Marconi, Ronnie Wolfe, introduced him to the author who was to be his hero and inspiration, William Saroyan. Wolfe, later to become a successful television comedy writer in partnership with Ronald Chesney, urged Story to get hold of Saroyan’s latest collection of stories, Dear Baby. He did so, and was bowled over. According to Darwent – also a ...”

“... all. Here he is in a letter to Mary, written from Ravenna in August 1821 (he was holidaying with Byron, always an unsettling experience): ‘My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you – our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, – shut upon my retreat the floodgates of the world. I would ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were ...”

“... diabolic Castlereagh figure ‘tossed’ the dogs ‘human hearts to chew’. In the same year, Byron set out Castlereagh’s misanthropic and authoritarian vision of the world in Don Juan: States to be curb’d, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made – Cobbling at manacles for all mankind – A tinkering slave-maker, who mends ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... really separates a masterpiece of the genre like Greene’s from a frequently attractive work like William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu is that Greene seeks no pretext or context or subtext for his trip other than himself. Dalrymple’s, on the other hand, is both complicated and distracted by his notion of retracing the ancient travels of Marco Polo from Jerusalem ...”

“... independently in different historical periods. In The Cuckqueanes and Cuckolds Errants (c. 1601), William Percy used a double parenthesis in a speech by Pearle to suggest a pearl within an oyster; and in the novel Foe (1986) J.M. Coetzee wrote of storytelling: ‘Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold ...”

“... moving to a peak, or more usually a series of mountains or molehills, before going into decline. William Pitt the Younger is the great exception. Because of his parentage and abnormal abilities he began at the top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when ...”

“... solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the contemporary writers ...”

“... have been ripostes to ‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ – and she was considered the female Byron. ‘The Ballad of the Harp Weaver’, which won her the Pulitzer, was turned into a song by Johnny Cash.Rhetorically, Millay was a genius: her mastery of attitudes and devices owed a lot to her training as an actress. She knew the value of a theatrical ...”

“... of merit, nor of density, but of pace. If you read attempts by 19th-century English poets (Byron is something of an exception) to write poetic drama, and compare their lines with Shakespeare’s, the difference is all the more surprising because it’s so clear that Shakespeare was their model. Their lines are static where Shakespeare’s are ...”

“... little shirts, and ‘kiss as though it had been God Himself’. (Four hundred years later, Lord Byron thought that Venetian women kissed better than any other, which he attributed to the worship of images and ‘the early habit of osculation induced thereby’.) Thomas More, who would become a saint himself, might insist that simple people could read images ...”

“... the stock satiric material) is an almost affecting sombreness. ‘Almost’ affecting, because William Pirates, the reclusive eccentric who is meant to evoke it, and on whom the novel’s action pivots (by promising an appearance on telly, Pirates lures to his house on an Essex estuary an assortment of egocentric media bores and pseuds, total ...”

“... But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but the three poets in question ...”