For many years Carlyle, or rather Carlyle and his wife Jane and their odd life together, proved a magnet for biographers, even though his books were less and less read. In recent years, however, personalised interest in him has slackened greatly and not long ago one critic even referred to Carlyle as "an extinct volcano". The blurb for this new Life calls him "the most influential man of letters of his day", a tendentious claim for which the book itself gives no cogent evidence. His quasi racist crankery is merely irritating today and his mannered, exclamatory, hectoring prose style (based largely on the German writer Jean Paul Richter) is intolerable in large amounts; but the Victorians liked, and apparently needed, prophets and moral censors and he played the role with a kind of quasi biblical fervour. His fellow Scot, Ruskin, it seems, was the only man who could manage him in private, though Carlyle had rather a weakness for titled women. In the end, there seems no obvious reason to dissent with Compton Mackenzie's famous description of him as "the hairy old bore of Ecclefechan".