“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick to detect a snub and fiercely proud. He claimed he first took opium as a ...”

“... or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not necessarily related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of Nightmare Abbey – young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and ...”

“... to the way the machinery question was perceived. It was not enough to be for or against what Carlyle called ‘the huge demon of Mechanism’. It was also a question of who gained and who lost. To Harriet Martineau, vulgarising the lessons of political economy in 1832, the introduction of machinery was a simple issue: ‘It was a saving of labour; and as ...”

“... its author died, and is 97 now. Still the books keep coming. This latest pair, by Barry Gewen and Thomas Schwartz, have moved beyond outrage to something more like bafflement, tinged with affection. Each begins with an effective admission of authorial uncertainty: why, they ask, am I writing about Henry Kissinger, when so much has been written already? The ...”

“... most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas Fuller and Tristram Shandy on its sleeve. At other times it has a tart poeticism: ‘He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.’ Or exhibits that proto-Dickensian habit of comic ...”

“... moral quality of the culture as a whole. The great names here, whom Priestley admired, included Carlyle (who coined the term ‘Condition of England’), Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. In the closing decades of the 19th and the early years of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward ...”

“... stigma of his politics will one day be separated from his writing, which I regard very highly,’ Thomas Mann said in 1955, but when asked to support the setting up of a Knut Hamsun Society in Germany he replied that ‘the wretched, and really wicked things he constantly said, wrote and did are too fresh in my mind.’ The idea of the society was in one ...”

“... of opinion in a tradition which emerged early in the 19th century with Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle and J.S. Mill, and in the 20th century included Orwell. Their idea-mongering brought them into an uneasy relationship with the modern university. In an age of near-universal literacy and the mass production of pulp literature and ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small ...”