“... I wouldn’t be that interested in Yeats’s opinion of my work, whereas I would be interested in Matthew Arnold’s.Is there anyone alive that you feel about in some way as you do about such writers from the past?The whole idea of the companionship of past writers is enacted in the head and on the page, so there are people I still think of as alive, as ...”

“... for AliceThus all the books on any given subject are found standing together, and no additions or changes ever separate them.Melvil Dewey, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a LibraryIrishFormal PeopleWaitressing for GodotGirl with Green ThighsA Farewell to ArmaghScottishA Drunk Man Licks at the ThistleTed GauntletSunset SnogFife: A User’s ManualCookbooksMoll FlanBuns and LoversOblomangeTart of DarknessMedicalThe IlliadRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are DeafGays’ AnatomyThe Scarlet PimpleTravelVenice: The MenaceMiddle GiddingLeaves of GrazThe Descent of ManchesterMedievalGaudy KnightThe Brompton Folding Mystery CycleD ...”

“... M. de Charlus first grasps that the ex-tailor, Jupien, is homosexual, and himself gets to grips. Matthew Arnold, usually accurate in his botany, slips up by calling the convolvulus blue, though he corrected that to pink in later editions of the poem. Keats, admittedly unable to see what flowers were at his feet, nor what soft incense hung upon the ...”

“... and, in increasing numbers, by women. If the traditional objection to ‘men of letters’ was, as Matthew Arnold put it, that ‘they did not know enough,’ the objection to the new professional critics is that they know too much, and that their knowledge can only be imparted to a trained, disciplined readership. Whether this readership amounts to a ...”

“... Derrida published a vast essay in praise of Levinas, ingeniously framed by two quotations: Matthew Arnold on Hebraism and Hellenism, and ‘Jewgreek is greekjew’ from Ulysses. Thanks to Derrida’s abiding loyalty and sincere flattery, Levinas suddenly found himself hoisted to a position among the celebrities of Parisian post-structuralism ...”

“... off’ not just against Auden, but also against Donne, George Herbert, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Frost). You might think of this as a talent for adaptability. In The Buried Day Day Lewis is frank about the ‘incipient hero-worship’ of his youth, and recalls that ‘I possessed certain qualities which would make it fairly easy for ...”

“... jungle,’ Eliot reflected urbanely in a lecture delivered at Harvard. Poets were defined not, as Matthew Arnold might have said, by their high culture but on the contrary by their ability to keep alive a taproot connection with pre-civilised modes of consciousness, so that, as Eliot put it, ‘hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than ...”

“... people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a capitalistic ...”

“... in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of year to be topping the charts. A week later, as ...”

“... by thoughts of death. Phoebe is rapturous at the beauty of the night, but for him, as for Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, the ‘dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars’, speaks of eternal nothingness: The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards ...”

“... cognate with theirs. His universe is not without Value, and he cannot give up on the Good. Like Matthew Arnold, spooked by the melancholy long withdrawing roar of the ocean, he still holds to the ideal of being true to one another. It’s not that the injunction ‘only connect’ is meaningless, just that in practice it proves so difficult. In ...”

“... ashamed of having written’. As Auberon Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to Matthew Arnold in Westminster Abbey was cut short by a letter from the Dean informing him that there already was one, ‘I am still sure that there is a point to be made, even if I am no longer quite so sure what it is.’ Besides, there is now, whatever ...”

“... Nicholas Murray Butler, who had read admiring reviews in England of Trilling’s first book, on Matthew Arnold. At that same time, Harry Levin, somewhat younger than Trilling, was teaching in the Harvard English Department, where he had been a famously brilliant student and where he was clearly destined for tenure. In 1940 Bellow’s friend Delmore ...”

“... philosophise in their works, but also the Victorian ‘slice of life’ theory still admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or ...”

“... of the fact that the word ‘principles’ sounds modest and practicable. Hartman, who rebukes Matthew Arnold for deprecating French thought, says sternly that ‘concepts of national character are dangerous or comic,’ but proceeds immediately to ignore the danger and the comedy: ‘but this Anglo-American conservatism ...’ In fact, he has all ...”