“... by Leavis to review The Liberal Imagination, he set out to show that Trilling was America’s Matthew Arnold. All the same, he became convinced that literary criticism would never again be thought of as the great synoptic subject, and that no one in the future would achieve the fame and centrality granted to Trilling in America and Leavis in ...”

“... Ian became a professor of law at Victoria University, a rather fierce but much respected teacher. Arnold, my father, went from teaching at school and university to the NZCER and then the civil service, first as an inspector. He said that he wished he had been named not after Arnold of Rugby, but after ...”

“... from biography, Heffer’s favourite source is the contemporary novel. Again and again he mines Arnold Bennett, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found ...”

“... an Irishman bearing the exquisitely un-Protestant name of Murphy, which enliven the pages of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: but both belong to the same record of continual religious controversy in 19th-century England. (It was intramural contention, however, not the larger one between Protestant and Catholic, which ignited one of the most ...”

“... So far as I remember, it was the cosmopolitan Somerset Maugham who remarked that francophile Arnold Bennett thought that the French were the only foreigners who breakfasted on rolls and coffee. Ms Greer’s one-eyed view of art history has the same disadvantage. If you had nothing to go on except her chronicle of women painters whose works were later ...”

“... of a poet’s preferred dramatis personae – Wordsworth’s beggars and village idiots, Matthew Arnold’s Carthusian monks and gypsies, the young Auden’s ‘airman’, Lionel Johnson’s and T.S. Eliot’s vanquished Kings – the investigation is seen to be fascinating and instructive. But already with Wordsworth and consistently thereafter ...”

“... movement. It has certainly never provided Christian socialism with mass appeal. The Guild of St Matthew, which was founded by Stewart Headlam in 1877, and by 1884, according to Bryant, was the first explicitly socialist organisation in Britain, had at most a membership of 360. Its stated aim was to fight secularist prejudice, to defend the Church of England ...”

“... the great social historian who had made Carlyle and Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like love or it is nothing.’ He fused England, poetry, joy, youth and landscape in a single sacramental experience. If this is rather like ...”

“... he moved back and forth from being worldly to being world-weary. In the summer of 1881 he wrote to Matthew Arnold: ‘I have only now, too late perhaps, found out how all art requires solitude as its companion, only now indeed know the splendid difficulty of this great art in which you are a master illustrious and supreme.’ He enclosed his first book of ...”

“... Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture. Religion had traditionally bred a sense of duty, deference, altruism and spiritual edification in the common ...”

“... remember Ruskin’s murmur: ‘I am afraid Wordsworth was often affected in his simplicity.’ Or Matthew Arnold’s insistence that what in Wordsworth is true simplicity can become in Tennyson the affected thing, simplesse:French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful ...”

“... on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled borrowings from the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew and Jeremiah. He concluded that for those with ears to hear a biblical subtext, ‘America’s adversaries had been redefined as enemies of God and current events had been constituted as confirmation of scripture’ . . . Occasional presidential use of ...”

“... one will not study Locke but Defoe.’ I would like to believe that. Pocock isolates the royalist Matthew Wren as the most systematic exponent of ‘possessive individualism’. The main object of throwing out these sparkling ideas is to annoy the orthodox: Pocock wastes no time on asking why ‘a possessive-individualist view of society was promoted by ...”

“... is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits, in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.’ He felt obliged – an obligation which was part of the pretention of his epoch – to call such insights ‘evidence of the law of antagonism’. But they are shrewd, for all ...”

“... tradition. The Report is an odd mixture of high-minded argument and transparent political motives. Matthew Arnold’s rebuke to the complacent philistines of his day has by now – in the wake of 1917 – taken on a more urgent toning. Deny the working classes their share of the nation’s spiritual heritage, and they are likely to forget all about the ...”