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“... before the Carlyles’ Collected Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view ...”

“... as a pair, with a single index, and rightly, because they hold together for a coherent segment of Carlyle’s life. The dominant theme of the two is the writing of The French Revolution: in Volume VIII Carlyle is struggling with the first two volumes, in IX he produces the third, spends four months battling with the proofs ...”

“... I told the Führer that I had recently been reading Carlyle’s book on Frederick the Great,’ Goebbels records in his diary of 27 February 1945: He knows the book very well himself. I repeated certain passages from the book to him and they affected him very deeply. That is how we must be and that is how we will be ...”

“... By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from ...”

“... in feeling and outlook which determine how it is regarded. There are people in any age, like Jane Austen, or Tom Poole, who see things pretty steadily and whole, and without necessarily being censorious have a good idea of what constitutes decent conduct and bad conduct, selfishness, thoughtlessness, blind lack of consideration, all masquerading as ...”

“... Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in which most observers would have favoured Mill. Something deep in Mill’s outlook offended Toryism, old or new, whereas something ...”

“... vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle with both ...”

“... 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 WelshCarlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude ...”

“... all around them. Other essays in the first half (‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love”’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’) aren’t about death but do explore authors’ writings to elicit patterns of feeling or of the want of feeling. Though none of this is explained in principle, some explanation will be forthcoming three hundred pages ...”

“... His title, the friendship of the Queen, the affection and admiration of such peers as Dickens, Carlyle, Browning and George Eliot, and the veneration of almost everybody else, somehow came to seem the natural outcome of his use of his talent; and much in his later life may be attributed to his having grown into his role. Yet through it all he retained his ...”

“... of power and the nature of equality within marriage’.The private lives considered are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin; Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens; George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. This is the form in which Rose presents the ...”

“... bluestocking adolescents’ When James Russell Lowell read the recently published letters of Jane WelshCarlyle in 1883, the American ambassador and poet likened the experience to listening to the gossip of female servants: ‘There are disclosures there that should never have been made, as if they had been caught ...”

“... expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative forms, even the undisciplined ...”

“... you best? In literature this sort of thing has a heartbreaking history, if one thinks of, say, Jane WelshCarlyle, or Mrs Tennyson, or Vera Nabokov; but what if Pamela Stephenson, the clinical psychologist married to Billy Connolly, is the modern version? Here is a woman who never fails, in her ultra-bestselling ...”