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“... Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with no holds barred. If Carlyle hadn’t lumbered him with a preposterous legacy – his papers, responsibility for his reputation, an exhortation to ...”

“... to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of literature taking the place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The ...”

“... gift of oratory’, felt uneasy about his vituperativeness and his unhealthy reverence for Thomas Carlyle. In 1933, he joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and quickly emerged as one of the movement’s principal rhetoricians; within months he was addressing an audience of more than five thousand. For the next couple of years – the ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and ...”

“... Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point. Punch at least seems to have established a lasting reputation along the Nile, because it was by those shores that the ...”

“... existence on the plateau Selous was prepared to deny. Singing in that language, the extraordinary Thomas Maphumo has established a world-wide reputation with a musical style that melds a traditional Shona instrument, the mbira, and its bubbling rhythm with influences from rock, soul and reggae – and with political protest. Zimbabwe has horrendous economic ...”

“... down from the old days, sanctified with the reflected glamour of the past. Anny was fond of Jane Carlyle, but sometimes lost patience with Thomas. ‘At this moment I am furious with him, cross-grained, ungrateful, self-absorbed old nut-cracker. He who could have such beautiful thoughts should have lamented not his fellow ...”

“... contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary KBR; or the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based global investment firm, of which Baker is senior counsellor. Carlyle is where former top government officials come to roost alongside powerful business leaders, to raise funds and identify ...”

“... Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep ...”

“... history of many things, but in most places, at most times, and for most people, it was and is as Thomas Gray described it in 1750: ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. So far so good. But if poverty is promoted from a platitude to a problem, things become much more difficult. For the problems of poverty are simple yet complex: what is poverty? And ...”

“... written by a friend or family member: ‘E.C. Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë’, ‘Froude’s Carlyle’ and Hallam ‘Tennyson’s Tennyson’. Not just records but interpretations of lives, these more or less massive works (Froude’s amounted to nine volumes) enable Ricks to develop his exploration of literature’s concern with the feelings. True to ...”

“... one of the founding fathers of London University. Like a number of the Victorian sages – Mill, Carlyle, Lewes – Grote had a highly intelligent wife who was a full intellectual helpmeet, and like even more of them (add Ruskin, Pater and George Eliot, for example) he was childless – to be exact, his only child died a week after birth. The sight of Mrs ...”

“... although she used to talk in later life about what a strange lottery marriage was. What was Thomas Carlyle’s figure of romance? One thing that can be said for the Romantic poets is that they were not snobs: their images of love were of violets by mossy stones rather than grand society hostesses. Carlyle looks ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”