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“... where the phylum or the city will end up – or whether the city is making us worse or better. Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury offers a less vertiginous outlook on the terrain by surveying one corner of it. Her focus is on ‘the activities of an earlier set of Bloomsbury-based pioneers, men and women of the 19th century who fought against ...”

“... and their intolerance wearing. For all their social success, for all their celebrity – and, as Rosemary Ashton points out, they attracted more attention than any other couple in England – they had to restock their social circles again and again. To Carlyle success seemed a long time coming and his achievement peculiarly liable to be undone. In ...”

“... to compare his thought with ‘what little we understand of Fichte’s’, but again wrong, as Rosemary Ashton explains in her admirable book The German Idea, in failing to understand that Fichte and Fichteans differed fundamentally from Kant in rejecting the Thing in Itself. You were to think the Thing only as a preparation for thinking that that ...”

“... juggernaut of Republicanism’. Life was much more awkward for the small group who form Dr Ashton’s subject. They came because they had to. Few knew whether they were going to be here for two years or twenty. England was a refuge, not a home. Some, like the Kinkels, were determined to make the best of it and became ultra-Anglophiles – a ...”

“... outset, to combine Carlyle’s correspondence with that of his wife has paid off handsomely. As Rosemary Ashton observed in her Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, ‘We can read more letters of Carlyle and Jane, and above all more letters between Carlyle and Jane, than perhaps of any other couple in history.’ Jane Welsh Carlyle was a ...”

“... the reader. The introductions to both reprint series can only be described as mixed in quality. Rosemary Ashton is excellent on Marriage, Judy Simons coolly precise on Cecilia, and Sara Maitland decent, if thin on Self-Control. But Eva Figes does not get very far with Belinda, and Sandra Shulman on The Female Quixote is childish and vulgar-an immense ...”

“... for Eliot’s ‘study of provincial life’ as ‘astonishingly fully realised’. Actually, Rosemary Ashton is a little nearer to Stephen in manner than some of her more cautiously academic fellow contributors, writing, for example, that ‘Marian’s was a difficult life, but a brave and extremely interesting one.’ Of course, Stephen would ...”