1. And, of course, he led the life of a voluptuary when not playing.

2. The Marquis, as he is called (suggesting, of course, the Marquis de Sade), is a parodic evil aesthete and voluptuary with his monocle and beard, his gifts of marrons glacés and hothouse flowers, and his penchant for quoting the juicier bits of Baudelaire and De Sade.

3. For whilst we would neither seek to create nor to gratify a prurient appetite for scandal, in relation to a subject with respect to which that appetite is so easily excited as the vices or follies of the great, we do feel that it is a circumstance which strongly conduces to the welfare and interest of a nation, when the monarch, instead of being an insulated and selfish voluptuary, is known to be constant and unostentatious in the fulfilment of domestic duties, and the natural displayof tender and virtuous affections.

4. With Byron‘s wife, Annabella Milbanke (of whose sanctimony the poet quips, "She would make Cromwell look like a backsliding voluptuary"), he borrows Jane Austen‘s acerbic quill: "In all there was about her a quality of quiet self– containment that could not fail to elicit admiration, even where it did not inspire affection." (There is an even more obvious homage to Austen later, when Annabella notes, "[S]he must admit it as a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man not in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.") After the poets make their grand entrance, the novel encompasses enough love affairs and tragedy for a dozen bodice–rippers, without ever losing its clear–eyed intelligence.