Word: byronically
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Thus Biographer Peter Quennell (Byron: the Years of Fame} starts Byron and his retinue, like latter-day Canterbury pilgrims, on a sentimental journey that was to take the Poet away from England for ever, lead him at last to Greece and death at the age of 36. Byron in Italy is an account of what Byron did while he was waiting for death - his friendship with Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his affairs with various Venetian slum women and men ; his services as a gigolo-extraordinary to dumpy, dull, married Countess Teresa Guiccioli. It is also an account...
...world's great legends, the Byron story will stand almost any amount of retelling. Retold by Peter Quennell, the result is a minor literary event. Reason: Peter Quennell probably knows more about Byron and the romantic movement than any man alive, tells what he knows in a cadenced Bloomsbury prose that is only now & again too self-consciously elegant. As no one appreciates better than sly Author Quennell, a biography of Byron is ipso facto a novel by Proust...
Eyes for Nipples. When Byron reached Switzerland, he wrote on the hotel blotter after the question Age?: 100. He was 28. But his thick reddish hair was already greying, though "darkened by the lavish use of macassar...
...only Englishman at the hotel. Already installed was the son of the "exceedingly respectable Member for New Shoreham," Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her stepsister, Byron's ex-mistress, Claire Clairmont. "Like many professional libertines," says Author Quennell, "Byron had a deep regard for the domestic proprieties," distrusted Shelley's brand of radicalism-"all green tea and fine feelings. ..." But he was reassured when he observed that Shelley was "as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room." Soon they were having a fine romantic time together. One midnight Byron...
...circle was shortly joined by Matthew Gregory ("Monk") Lewis, a "boyish-looking man, with large, bulging, curiously flattened eyeballs which projected from his cranium like the eyes of an insect." Lewis was the author of the best-selling shocker, The Monk. So shocked was Byron that he complained that the book was filled with "the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary...