“... too self-conscious. ‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way,’ said Matthew Arnold, and such is the great art of biography. One day in mid-March, as Swift sat in his chair, he reached towards a knife. But Mrs Ridgeway moved it away from him. He shrugged his shoulders, rocked himself, and said, ‘I am what I am, I am what I ...”

“... Towards the end, the redemptive power of literature comes crashing onto the stage in the person of Matthew Arnold. ‘Dover Beach’ plays a crucial role, and in one sense it’s a well-chosen poem: the confused alarms and ignorant armies chime nicely with the novel’s public themes. But even McEwan’s powers of persuasion can’t make the scene in which it ...”

“... and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the task in his monumental edition of the Gladstone diaries. Matthew became the founding editor of the ODNB in 1992, and much of the credit for both the conception and the early ...”

“... and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because his translatorese verse-prose is hard to read at long stretches. This new and revelatory ...”

“... never treated anybody as a black beetle. The contrast with Connolly and that world (what a set, as Matthew Arnold said of the sleaziness around Shelley) could not be more marked. Where Connolly and his circle wanted to make bad blood, J.B. Yeats wanted people to be of good heart. Where Connolly, a young man in a hurry, has little time except for dispatching ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from his first precocious fanmail to Arthur Askey to a final letter of humorous verse to his son Matthew. But it is Tynan’s school and university days that represent the golden age of his letter-writing career. The letters written during this period, particularly those to his friend Julian Holland, are lordly communiqués, full of cinéaste ...”

“... fairly sure to hear of in the course of his schooling, you would be wise to put your money on Sir Christopher Wren. I think the equivalent holds good in Turkey. At least, I am writing this review in a school exercise-book I bought in Istanbul: the front cover bears a portrait of Mimar Sinan, and its reverse side gives a brief biography and enumerates the ...”

“... apparently believes that he is overjoyed to be a witness to ‘the humanation of a god’. But St Matthew makes it clear that the Magi had come to see the new-born King of the Jews. They had no reason to doubt that the baby was human, so if the old Magus was really doing what Steinberg supposes, it could only be to satisfy himself that the child was not a ...”

“... try to combine the doctrine of Parmenides with that of Heraclitus.’ (Well, what a bright idea.) Matthew Arnold sniffily told his mother that Tennyson was ‘deficient in intellectual power’. But, for all that, Tennyson was perfectly assiduous in keeping up with major developments, including scientific discoveries (something of which Auden, who was also ...”

“... 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 common ...”

“... since the time of his deposition in 1399, but is it right? In his new study of Richard’s reign, Christopher Fletcher argues that, far from exhibiting boyish or feminine characteristics, as his enemies alleged, Richard strove to live up to contemporary ideas about how a man should behave. In many ways he was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you. My old tutor, Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention. He rubbed out his notes if he sold the book, but not always very thoroughly, so one can usually recognise a volume which belonged to ...”

“... dark significance at work here? Was it normal for 18-year-olds to spend their time translating Matthew Arnold into Greek? Was it healthy for such striplings to behave as if they ran the world? But then Balliol men did run the world, or used to. They used to run India. Was Mehta the victim of some deep colonial brainwash? At the time, he was in no mood to ...”