“... is Dickens’s hell? Where is the social realism in Crabbe’s ‘Tales’ or Mrs Gaskell’s or Arnold Bennett’s novels? In men and women and angels and demons? No, in places. We move about in these little islands according to the statements listed in a double gazetteer: one from the AA, and the other begun by Celts and Saxons, or even by Romans, for ...”

“... progressed, followed similar lines, with a newly-militant Nonconformity rampant in the North (Matthew Arnold takes up arms against it in Culture and Anarchy), while Anglicanism cultivated the Barsetshire parishes. Politically, as students of electoral geography have shown, the North-South divide was almost as apparent in Mid-Victorian times as it was ...”

“... idiosyncrasies of the artist’s vision. They stress ‘provinciality of feeling’ against Arnold’s urbane ‘tone of the centre’, the beauty of association which makes a battered tankard more important than the finest Greek vase, and a worn threshold more interesting than mists and mountains. They celebrate individuality, irregularity, and optical ...”

“... and which emerges again in Robert Burton, Tennyson and the ‘eternal note of sadness’ that Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. Albion is itself expressive of ‘one of the most significant and salient aspects of the English imagination’ – its reverence for the past. There is no hint of identity crisis here; no sign of the bewilderment ...”

“... multiplicity may turn out to be a trickier sort of virtue than it might seem. ‘Browning,’ Matthew Arnold told his friend Clough, ‘is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness,’ apparently unwilling or unable to understand that one ‘must begin with an Idea of the ...”

“... Morland and Benjamin Haydon as Dickens and George Eliot were superior in ambition to Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. In the case of caricature as well as fiction, the artist in the newer genre was doing something that the well-precedented talent in the dignified genre could never have conceived of. (Arnold’s put-down of ...”

“... and sentimental maidens in quasi-medieval settings. The texts of many of these editions (including Matthew Arnold’s) were surprising: they included poems appearing under newly concocted titles, selections ingeniously fashioned from distinct versions, and promiscuous arrangements that not even Wordsworth had attempted. This ‘textual anarchy’, as Gill ...”

“... Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It’s not so much that he said anything ...”

“... this book is among other things a manifesting of the function of criticism at the present time. Matthew Arnold’s supreme essay is everywhere relevant to the enterprise, not least because his are the reservations about Romanticism which have proved the most enduringly intelligent. Dr Butler would agree with him that ‘for the creation of a ...”

“... reverence for the poets of the past, suddenly forgot that he did, and began, ‘So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl,’ and went on: ‘But all the time he was talking she had in mind/The notion of what his whiskers would feel like/On the back of her neck.’ He could recite large sections of ‘Lycidas’, adding a commentary in the voice of ...”

“... took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic engagement. (The big difference is that the great and good of Breslau in the 19th and early 20th centuries ...”

“... was highly successful, both critically and commercially. Benstock takes her title from a snatch of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Resignation’ copied by Wharton into her Commonplace Book in 1908: ‘They believe me, who await/No gifts from chance have conquered fate’. What Arnold is celebrating is that markedly Victorian ...”

“... to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold loosely divided English society into three classes, the Philistines (the middle classes), the Populace (the working ...”

“... having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when he was 14; his temporary blindness three years later; and – most damaging – the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was 20. These traumas resurface, symptomatically, everywhere in his fiction. Julia’s ...”

“... Gilman traces this myth back to the Gospels, attaching dubious importance to the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates ...”