“... experiment undertaken by ‘the modern Prometheus’, as the subtitle of the novel describes him, Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. For the Romantics the myth served as both an image of potentially fatal transgression, and an inspiring political allegory. ‘Of thine impenetrable Spirit,’ wrote Byron in his 1816 poem ‘Prometheus’, ‘Which ...”

“... during her twenties; she translated Prometheus Bound twice before composing Aurora Leigh. Like Shelley she thought of Prometheus as a radical. But there was also an autobiographical impulse. Confined to her sickbed by a mysterious illness, she identified with his bondage. That much is clear from her 1832-33 translation. When she returned to the tragedy a ...”

“... and his sense of it, is a very contemporary one: it is post-Romantic and post-Nietzschean. Shelley seems old-fashioned beside him, a man still living in a settled world of religion and ideology. Yet at the same time Keats’s art, and his true sense of it, is extraordinarily ‘conservative’, as that of the common reader usually is. His most natural ...”

“... once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout Presbyterian who believed that to get married was ‘sort of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas ...”

“... Apostles. This select brotherhood was heavily into male bonding, arcane causes and Wordsworth and Shelley (Byron was too worldly and cynical). They wrote poetry themselves and communicated via interminable letters about the meaning of life and the problem of how to act in order to realise the self and redeem the world. But in Tennyson’s day the Apostles ...”

“... the French Revolution and the doctrines that accompanied it were to Wordsworth, or Godwinism to Shelley.’ The boldness of his claim becomes clear when we set it beside the almost simultaneous announcement by the influential critic John Palmer that Shakespeare was ‘forced’, by the public demand for plays about political figures, ‘to take the ...”

“... that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) has an Antiochus who commits ‘a shocking deed … in secret’ that is never specified, and a Marina who is sold into slavery, not prostitution. George Lillo’s theatrical redaction-adaptation, Marina, based on Acts ...”

“... on this matter, or indeed his use of the artistic medium to carry an argument, than his famous Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee. The drawing is a kind of dialogue between the claims and authority of a primitive style as against a realistic perspectivism. Rossetti represents worldliness as the illusionist space organised on the left of the ...”

“... Moderation’, which can be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse. As Mary Astell pointed out nearly three centuries ago, Milton’s defence of the subject’s liberty against the monarch clashed with his desire to subordinate women. But it could be argued that there was a structural link between his patriarchally Protestant ...”

“... any comparable body before the present day. Unlike their 18th-century Jacobin predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, or their Victorian successors such as Harriet Taylor and Josephine Butler, the Owenite feminists ascribed sexual repression and exploitation, not merely to the imbalance of power between the sexes, but to the whole structure of private ...”

“... racing various English officers around Venice; plunging into the sea while Trelawny cremated Shelley’s body.Eisler’s portrait of Byron is not going to prompt a radical reassessment of the poet, but she does write in more detail about his sex life than any previous biographer. As the blurb on the jacket would have it: ‘Here also are the first ...”

“... as in Homer, Spenser, Marlowe, the Shakespeare of Coriolanus, the Milton of Paradise Lost, Byron, Shelley, Fielding and Scott. Most of these were more widely read in pre-Civil War America than were any male American writers. With some notable exceptions early on, like F.O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley and Leslie Fiedler, in Harold Bloom’s critical admixture ...”

“... like H.G. Wells, perhaps. Peter Marshall’s biography is rich in interesting history, about Shelley, Godwin’s son-in-law, for instance, and about Mary Wollstonecraft, his first wife. It would have been good to read about Godwin’s first meeting with that lady if the account had not been misprinted thus: ‘When he ...”

“... of imagining, protecting – but also neutering – the seditious verse of Coleridge, Byron and Shelley in ways that would have made little sense to Pope or Defoe. At a dinner party in 1803, Sir Walter Scott, a Tory, launched into an admiring recitation of Coleridge’s vicious anti-Pitt eclogue ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ (1798), demonstrating that it ...”

“... by ‘No: I was a cannibal for twenty-five years,’ and went on to say that it was ‘Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet’. The instinct Freud recognised as Thanatos was dramatised by Shaw as ‘the gospel of St Andrew Undershaft’. (Incidentally, Freud and Shaw shared a fondness for the Salvation Army.) Cusins is ...”