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“... 1916 and sank.) ‘Titanic’ spelled trouble: like Lucifer, rebel against God; like Rome, fallen. Carlyle used the word to describe Danton and he came to no good. The White Star Line was asking for trouble. But it is an ill wind that blows no good. Jules Brulatour, pioneer of American cinema and founder of Universal Pictures, released what Wilson calls the ...”

“... were John Bright and John Stuart Mill; among its supporters Darwin, Huxley, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Hughes. Eyre’s supporters, led by Carlyle, included Ruskin, Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, as well as characters like the Earl of Cardigan, whose display of judgment at Balaclava did not seem to bother the Defence ...”

“... that ‘revolutions, or the calamities of kings have not formerly been odious to Mr Burke.’ Thomas Jefferson, who had been an eye-witness in Paris as Burke had not, declared that ‘the Revolution in France does not astonish me so much as the revolution of Mr Burke.’ Supporters of the Revolution like Paine and the Baron (‘Anacharsis’) Cloots had ...”

“... odd errors: Waterhouse at the time was employed at the Zoological Society, not the British Museum; Thomas Bell, who described Darwin’s reptiles, was not a ‘physician’ but a dentist – and medical politics in the 1830s made that a wide divide. It’s a pity, in an industry where Darwin’s every word is scrupulously dated and documented, that the ...”

“... had been hatched during weekend house-parties at the family pile in Derbyshire or at Osbert’s Carlyle Square townhouse. To those who got onto the guest-lists, the Sitwells were good fun. But they were more than that, some of their fans would say. During the Twenties, they were Bloomsbury without the piety; avant-gardism played for laughs. Admirers could ...”

“... the Start the week of the 1840s, and did rather well. Elizabeth Barrett admired her book and Carlyle liked the author. On the morning of Haydon’s death Browning, who had been invited to meet the Gräfin so often he felt obliged to plough through Faustina, wrote to tell Elizabeth Barrett that he didn’t think much of it. The accumulation of minute ...”

“... featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the ...”

“... of 1829 by Charles Lamb, in which he speaks of ‘true broad Hogarthian fun’, and an essay by Carlyle of 1837: ‘There is nothing more Hogarthian comic.’ Next comes Swinburne, fifty years later, speaking of ‘an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the ...”

“... Widespread anxiety produces phenomena unthinkable in more prosperous times: for example, Thomas Piketty’s seven hundred-page volume of economic theory, Capital in the 21st Century, joining the bestseller lists. During crises of capitalism in the 20th century, the equivalent bestsellers were narratives of social history. R.H. Tawney’s Religion and ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... The pool has been comprehensively scooped. Forster got first dibs on the blacking factory episode. Thomas Wright broke the Ellen Ternan scandal. Edgar Johnson had first go at the Burdett-Coutts material. And the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of the letters have forbidden Ackroyd from quoting anything other than ‘occasional and brief phrases from Dickens’s ...”

“... dated, in terms of art, as the titanic activities of those two terrible heroes of the century, as Carlyle would have seen them and as Heidegger has seen them – Hitler and Stalin? Like every other Russian intelligent of his time, the young Pasternak saw Soviet man as the logical product of the life force – ‘the concept of Sovietness being the most ...”

“... selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like Westminster, is an exercise in runaway Gothic: but whereas British Victorians favoured Gothic because they viewed it as their own indigenous style, Canadians might have employed it primarily to ...”

“... music dramas staged. This is clearly what moved and impressed exceptional Wagnerians like Proust, Thomas Mann and Mallarmé. It is precisely Wagner’s extremely varied legacy – a legacy which includes Toscanini, Boulez, Schoenberg, and critical critics like Deathridge, Nattiez and Adorno – that Paul Rose’s book attempts to refute. Not that his book ...”

“... Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the present century next to Liston and Lord Carlyle’), Jung Bahadur (the Nepalese ambassador to London), Savile Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel Follin (a businessman from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of ...”