"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from EnglandBiographers from EnglandFellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Original Language: English
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(quote from p. ix; 1st edition, 2017, Fourth Estate, an imprint of )
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kathryn_Hughes
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Kathryn Hughes
(born 1959) is an English biographer, historian, journalist, and professor emerita in the School of Literature, Drama and Writing at the . Her book George Eliot: The Last Victorian was awarded the 1999 for biography. Hughes, an expert on the , has contributed articles to ', ', ', and '.
8 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Kathryn Hughes →
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