Statue of Byron at Park Lane. He wrote "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," "Beppo" and "Don Juan." He also helped liberate Greece from Ottoman rule. But... he slept with his half-sister and spent his last months chasing after a 15 year-old boy. What say you: Remain or go? 
Memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford. Wrote "Ozymandias," "Prometheus Unbound" and inspired everyone from Oscar Wilde to Leo Tolstoy. But... He ran away with Mary Wollstonecraft when she was only 16 and he was already married. Stay or go?
Statue of Philip Larkin at Hull. Wrote "Aubade," "An Arundel Tomb," and "This Be The Verse." But... He made rebarbative jokes (and composed light verse) about women and blacks and young girls in his private correspondence. Thumbs up, thumbs down?
Perceptive Twitter follower adds my next one for me. Should Disney+ stop streaming "Alice in Wonderland" owing to the underaged muse for whom the Rev. Dodgson put pen to paper?
Nabokov House, St. Petersburg. Wrote numerous novels and short stories featuring what he termed "nymphets." Also put the English language--which he learned later in life--to magical use. Что делать?
Statue of Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. Arguably Argentina's greatest short story writer. But... He called Pinochet an "excellent person."
One Chilean certainly voted with his, er, appendage: theguardian.com/books/2011/jan…
Finally--and this one I really did save for last--the statue of George Orwell outside of Broadcasting House, the home of the BBC. Opposed Fascism, Stalinism and British imperialism, wrote "1984," and more memorable Eng.-language essays than any other writer of the 20th c. But...
Held homophobic views, which seeped their way into his otherwise excellent prose. E.g. Calling people "Nancy-boys" and "Even wanting to write about so-called artists who have spent on sodomy what they have gained by spongeing betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy."
Here's a fun one, which has an excellent crossover with clandestine operations. As you know, Marx's grave is at Highgate Cemetery. It, too, has been vandalized although this photo is from more than a year ago: theguardian.com/books/2019/feb…
Well, during Oleg Penkovsky's second trip to London (after he'd been recruited jointly by both the CIA and MI6), he noted that Marx's tomb had become a garbage heap: banana peels, orange rinds and ordinary rubbish. He photographed this scene and sent the picture back to Moscow...
To the Central Committee, in fact, noting, "This is how they treat Karl Marx, our national hero, here in London." There followed a minor scandal at the Soviet embassy. The KGB station chief was sacked, but the gravesite was kept clean thereafter.
BTW, on that trip to London, Penkovsky also squired around the wife and daughter of Ivan Serov, the head of the GRU (Penkovsky's original service). He bought them all manner of gifts using... CIA/MI6 money.
Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the fact that the temporary upkeep of Marx's final resting place owed to the most important spy the West ever ran during the Cold War.
Statue of Mark Twain in Elmira, NY. He’s credited with inventing the American novel and his satirical slaying of fashionable nonsense (Christian Science, Fenimore Cooper) has made him the high-water mark for American humor. But... He briefly fought for the Confederacy.
Twain even mined that experience for a long essay, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”: classicshorts.com/stories/phctf.…
Twain also acknowledged the atrocities of slavery, to which he admitted being blind in his youth, in his “Autobiography.” Nonetheless, the use of racist vernacular in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” has long been a point of contention when it comes to assigning him in schools.
Minnesota, in fact, banned “Huck Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” from the curriculum over their use of the n-word. This was in 2018: independent.co.uk/schools-us-ban…
For all that, the last recipient of the coveted Mark Twain Prize for humor was...Dave Chappelle, the most fearless and unvarnished stand-ups talking about race and racism in America today: nytimes.com/2019/10/28/art…
T.S. Eliot bust in his hometown of St. Louis. Wrote “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” His greatest critics/exegetes tended to be Jewish Marxisant intellectuals, particularly the Partisan Review crowd. But in “After Strange Gods” he wrote the following:
