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“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... the view of the self offered by literature was still fairly oblique. It was that moral desperado Thomas Carlyle who first put the question squarely, in Sartor Resartus: ‘Who am I; the thing that can say "I” . . . Whence? How? Whereto?’ Taken up by countless young clerks and artisans, Carlyle nevertheless had ...”

“... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...”

“... the world, as well as for the ‘dark terror’ induced by its inscrutable transmissions. Later, Thomas Carlyle described the telegraph’s wooden elbows ‘jerking and fugling in the air’: ‘On the whole, is it not, O Reader, one of the strangest Flame-Pictures that ever painted itself; flaming off there, on its ground of Guillotine-black?’ Yes ...”

“... edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it appeared. But for Catholics like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... It’s a century and a quarter since J.A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle and his edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude ...”

“... and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal Institution relaunched science for the new century with an assurance to the English hierarchy that, under his ...”

“... of literature who have presented their doctrines with that kind of cloudy enthusiasm which led Thomas Carlyle to call literature ‘a great foam-froth’. On both groups of authors Descombes is excellent. His account of structuralism with its emphasis on the debt to the mathematics of Bourbaki and to the practice of such anthropologists as Dumézil is ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s ...”

“... Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the ...”

“... presents for the would-be popular biographer is evident in his entry in the Concise DNB: Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895), man of science; studied at Charing Cross Hospital; announced, 1845, discovery of the layer of cells in root sheath of hair which now bears his name; MB London, 1845; made assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake 1846-50, investigations ...”

“... tone. Lyttleton even evokes the names of other letter-writers already enshrined in volume form – Carlyle, whom Lytton Strachey said was ‘too long’, and Swift, whom the same authority qualified, with characteristic wrong-headedness one may think, or indeed impertinence, as ‘too dry’. These two are going to be amusing. It is hard to avoid the ...”

“... of every danger, and attentive to every alarm, the hare is continually upon the watch,’ Thomas Bewick said in his History of Quadrupeds (1790). A hare was ‘a great delicacy among the Romans’, but it was a sacred animal for the British, ‘who religiously abstained from eating it’ – a ‘hare-lipped’ child was said to be the consequence of ...”

“... Stalin. He is an unswerving member of the British Stalin Society. In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle pointed out that modern leader-figures must give voice to emerging currents of social passion and aspiration: they need to feed souls in need of faith and identity. Scargill’s powers of leadership and inspiration were never in doubt. But as ...”