Tag Archive: 0Lord Byron

Published in Boston in 1855, this is a sumptuous gift-book edition of Byron’s works, in the preparation of which ‘the publishers have spared no expense or delay in making it entirely complete.  In its progress through the press, it has undergone the careful supervision of a distinguished literary gentleman; and its proprietors feel that they […]

Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire.  Casanova had […]

‘Of all the countries which came under the spell of Byron’s pen and pageantry in the first half of the nineteenth century, none was more deeply entranced than Russia …  Certainly there was hardly a Russian poet in the romantic period who was not directly or indirectly influenced by Byron’s life and verse.  His name became […]