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“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... a place he knew about but did not know. The limitation of this is revealed, unintentionally, by Ruskin in his famous praise of ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’: ‘It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work.’ The poems encapsulate what ...”

“... part in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed the National Gallery of Art. The increasingly difficult and radical character of modern art may have further reinforced these ...”

“... replied: ‘Burke abused, Cobbett inveighed, Arnold was capable of malicious insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation or even malice, is any less genuine.’ Here, en toutes lettres, is the polemicist’s warrant. Edward’s own ...”

“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and ...”

“... weather and the snooping English press (‘the Inquisition’) were less to her liking. About Ruskin, a dinner companion, she was withering: ‘He is a gentleman, an educated gentleman; but he is a theorist. He sees nature with a little eye – just like a bird.’ She had already lent her name to a type of variegated red rose; by the 1860s German ...”

“... consequence. ‘To me life was simply not worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, of Mr Ruskin, of Mr Holman Hunt, of Mr Browning, or of the gentleman who built the Crystal Palace.’ Life was not worth living because he knew, and everyone else knew, that he did not have it in him to build the next Crystal Palace. His response to this impossible ...”

“... comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the far ...”

“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... Hulme survived the First World War, he wrote, ‘I should undoubtedly have played Turner to his Ruskin’; but as things transpired, he had to undertake both roles himself.Lewis also fought in the war, ‘an interminable nightmare’, including service at Passchendaele, ‘an epic of mud’. ‘I, figuratively, have never smiled again,’ he said, finding ...”

“... forth to London and Edinburgh, intrigued by what looked to be but was not a reliable offer from John Stuart Mill of a position at the new London Review, Carlyle and Jane moved into the house in Cheyne Row where they would live for the rest of their lives. They began to find their way into literary society almost at once. Emerson had already sought out ...”

“... as well as a panel. He was not in sympathy with the craft-based medievalism of the direct heirs of Ruskin and Morris in the Arts and Crafts movement: he employed joiners and fabric printers to carry out the artists’ designs, and had no objection to second-hand furniture being bought in for painting-up. But attention is not being given to Omega simply because ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... with Blake and several other Romantics at the far end, going through some aspects of Arnold and Ruskin, to Pater, Yeats and Lawrence, Graves, elements of Eliot and Woolf, and down to Leavis, Dylan Thomas and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes ...”

“... is different from the last: there are fairy tales, ghost stories, autobiographies, meditations on Ruskin; the settings are boarding schools, narratology conventions, fantasy villages. Any of Byatt’s formidable novellas might have been chosen, but we are given ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, in which a genie, over the course of a hundred ...”