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“... which, indeed, seems advancing towards us with a frightful, slow, unswerving consistency,’ Thomas Carlyle wrote as the disease entered Britain through Sunderland. Eventually it killed 52,000 in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson. What detail the story lacked could be supplied by readers, each in their own way ...”

“... were Sir James and Lady Crawfurd who had lost their eldest son at Hougoumount, the 21-year-old Thomas, a captain in the Third Regiment of Guards. All the while the social round limped on. In between visits to the wounded, when Gage was impressed with the care they received from local people – ‘not a single house was without one or more’ – he ...”

“... at his worst, gestured towards some narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake. Carlyle gestured towards some contented peasants working the lands of a kindly medieval abbot. Lots of us occasionally gesture in the direction of the lost world in which our parents or our grandparents told us they grew up. Heidegger, the great master of ...”

“... which it encountered. In 1966, Professor James Bertram brought out the New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, which included all Clough’s longer ‘anti-podistic’ letters to his friend between 1847 and 1851: these had been omitted from F.L. Mulhauser’s Correspondence of A.H. Clough (1957). The New Zealand Letters proved a fresh and vivid ...”

“... extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent sage: its grand aim is to bring ...”

“... theory of history similar to that of Vico and taken over by Matthew Arnold from his father Thomas: the fifth century BC, when Greek religion was challenged by the Greek enlightenment, was often held to correspond with the period when the modern Enlightenment was challenging Christianity. The third method depended upon Comte’s theory of the three ...”

“... again, and in particular the preoccupation with metaphysics which had so fascinated Coleridge, Carlyle and George Eliot. Disdaining textual positivism in all its forms, Stern taught his pupils (myself among them) and younger colleagues to treat novelists, dramatists, poets and philosophers as a simple continuum using the same currency of ideas. What rival ...”

“... more consideration here than do some of the run of the mill Authorised Version spin-offs, such as Thomas Macklin’s six-volume Bible published in 1800. Macklin’s doorstopper included 71 prints engraved from Biblical pictures by contemporary artists such as Joshua Reynolds, and so offers more to the aesthetic bibliophile than those versions that people ...”

“... what is generally agreed to be a bad and corrupt text, put out by the third Lord Holland in 1822. Carlyle, in a note to Frederick the Great, was one of the first to heap opprobrium on Holland: ‘a book unedited; little but long ignorances of a hopeless type’. Matters were not made easier by Walpole’s complicated instructions from beyond the grave on how ...”

“... European revolutions (Paris in 1848 as well as Rome in 1849) and was acquainted with everyone from Carlyle to Thoreau, Newman to Mazzini, Wordsworth and Tennyson to Spencer and Lyell. He contemplated launching himself as the ‘Apostle of Anti-Laissez-Faire’, got stuck into (as well as stuck on) the historical and philosophical problems rattling ...”

“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... cantata, suffers by comparison with Britten’s Spring Symphony, which set some of the same Thomas Nashe poetry a decade and a half later; and while the comparison may be unfair, it is revealing. Britten’s genius lay in the precise capture of verbal imagery and sonority in striking musical ideas. Sequence and balance mattered more to him than ...”

“... to face the worst. If we read further we find that Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter ...”

“... Cornelia, in earlier years, had enjoyed a brief flirtation with Shelley before her husband, Thomas Turner, carried her out of danger to a remote corner of Devon. Her letters, edited by the late Felicitas Corrigan, allude to ‘dear Shelley’ with near risible frequency; like Teresa Guiccioli, Cornelia Turner wanted nobody to forget that she had been ...”