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“... in her choices of heroes and heroines, all solitary, intrepid, self-determining figures – Thomas Mann, Simone Weil, Vladimir Nabokov – and it is most eloquently displayed in her essay on Melville’s Bartleby. As in her last volume of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, which had among its female victims and survivors a very persuasive account of ...”

“... of the Civil War era to the volunteer diarists of Mass-Observation three hundred years later. But Carlyle, like Lockhart, wasn’t cheering at the arrival of what he called, in 1831, ‘these Autobiographical times of ours’. Autobiography was also a phenomenon of high Romanticism, albeit uneasily so. If we follow the once standard definition established by ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... Harriet Martineau (whom Charles and his sisters once feared might carry Erasmus off in marriage), Thomas and Jane Carlyle, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes. Cash and connections flowed through family channels, and it was the family, too, that could be relied on to nurse invalids, assist with experiments, edit manuscripts, write ...”

“... eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the proximity they occupy in life. This is surely one reason for the rise of microhistory, that ...”

“... Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while more usually ...”

“... they peered out from behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... what he thought would be the final edition of Leaves of Grass), portraits of luminaries such as Carlyle, Emerson, Poe and Longfellow and ‘final confessions’ which are not – non-spoiler alert – particularly confessional. A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, he announces in the first pages: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do ...”

“... quiet here,’ Hardy wrote to his sister from Aldeburgh. ‘Whole town rather solitary,’ Carlyle said. (These details are lifted from Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is ...”

“... crowded diggings. A young lady distributes tracts. A crazed herb-seller moves anxiously forward. Carlyle himself is there, on the sidelines, looking curiously furtive. Central to the picture is its heroine, her poised gesture reflecting that of the valiant workman who stands behind her. She is a ragged child in charge of an unruly brood of siblings. A ...”

“... of the late Regency and early Victorian London that Scharf knew were left by artists, notably Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and Thomas Shotter Boys, whose eyes were fixed on the city’s architectural splendours, old and new. As with Canaletto’s paintings, one has the feeling that Shepherd and Boys ignored the people ...”

“... he seems to have settled for discussing the mediated view and we submit to the familiar cavalcade: Thomas West brings out his Guide (1778), which advises on the correct ‘stations’ from which to view this or that Picturesque vista. Wordsworth writes his Guide to the Lakes (1835), which idealises the hill farmer as the type of the sturdy Englishman, neither ...”

“... say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger contemporary of Lamb and Coleridge. John and Leigh Hunt brought a new idealism to English journalism when they launched the Examiner in 1808. At a time when most polite journals were still tied to the ...”

“... Welsh songs at the top of his voice, while his friend accompanied him on a penny whistle. Edward Thomas must have remembered his companion’s musical habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in ...”