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“... life. A biography the size of George Spater’s two-volume life of a far less seminal figure, William Cobbett, could hardly accommodate all that needs to be said about Carlyle in relation to his age, let alone the insistent question, a favourite one with the Victorians: what ‘message’ (if any) has he for us? Carlyle was buried, full of years and ...”

“... strategic and maritime benefits conferred on the empire by the Caribbean. The radical journalist William Cobbett, a rather unexpected ally of the slaveholders, believed that the planters ‘ought to be scrupulously attended to, as if they were farmers in Cornwall or in Yorkshire’ and were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and ...”

“... like the Cambridge critics who have written so well about him in the past. In Canaan, he praises Cobbett for ‘your singular pitch where labour is spoken of’, and the reader, rolling around ‘singular pitch’, murmurs to himself: ‘Christopher Ricks.’ Nothing is more Ricksian than Hill’s phrase in The Triumph of Love about Ruskin’s ...”

“... Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only ...”

“... the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At his public execution William Cobbett, looking out from his cell window (he was in for political libel), ‘saw the half-horrified countenances’ of the crowd, the ‘mournful tears’ running down their faces and ‘heard the unanimous blessings’. He ascribed this to their ...”

“... devised by men, and spurious in its concern for women.’ Among Place’s contemporaries, only William Cobbett disagreed with him, believing that the change was no more than ‘modesty in the word and grossness in the thought’, as proven by the growing number of prostitutes who ‘now swarm in our towns’, and by a rise in illegitimate ...”

“... I’m shattered by the impact of re-entry.) A news flash. In the latest by-election The Liberal William Pitt has won the seat. His personal appeal defies detection. At previous attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And Labour’s to abject ...”

“... philosophers continued to oppose tea on grounds of its stimulating and anti-soporific effects – William Buchan thought that tea was to be avoided in cases of melancholy and flatulence – but an expert consensus in its favour emerged. To the extent that tea was understood as a drug, it was generally judged a good one, repressing ‘vapours’, calming the ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... the press, but the nervous publisher John Murray preferred the politically safe editorial hand of William Gifford. The material censored by Murray and Gifford now appears in full, and McGann is right to point to the enhancement of Childe Harold as one of the great contributions of his edition so far. Canto III deserves illumination, since it may actually be ...”

“... included among the subjects of the Selborne Circle of Rural Writers reading group alongside White, William Cobbett, W.H. Hudson and George Sturt. Unfortunately for Mabey, who hoped to find in Thompson an undiscovered nature writer, she was no White (some of the best bits of Mabey’s book are about him) and the Grayshott literary scene made her even less ...”

“... had the fleas hosed off. Feet wrecked, limp out to the Beefeater. That was St Neots, the Ouse. William Cobbett, whose work Clare knew and admired, passed this way on one of his rural rides. A little downriver, towards Huntingdon, he took note: Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a Conservative measure. How ...”

“... many of them based on Pliny, Aristotle and others. ‘Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century and William Cobbett in the early 19th, both of them acute observers, held the Classical writers responsible for the bulk of English rural superstitions.’ Nor was the attack on ‘vulgar errors’ a new one, a new battle of world views in the 16th and 17th ...”