“... like dirty postcards in a drawer’. Then I remembered the line by which the same poet skewered Matthew Arnold: ‘And thrust his gift in prison till it died’. Sparrow was a man who appeared to have had every girt handed him by the gods: unshakeable homosexuality – no pram in the hall to make war on his early promise; brutal, but stunning ...”

“... ills, for Sénancour’s ‘inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness’. Those words of Matthew Arnold, half yearning and half disapproving, imply the curious relation between romantic swimming as balm and symbol of the death-wish, and public school swimming as it might be called – a bracing and brutal baptism to banish mollycoddling and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remain high. Remember, too, that it was in Franklin’s time, now so hopeful seeming, that Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach wrote of the ignorant armies, and of a world that had neither joy nor light nor life. Romance, rather than innocence, is the theme of ‘Isis in Darkness’, one of Margaret Atwood’s best. The short story thrives on the gap ...”

“... Shall I say a few words about Keats?’ Similarly he says a few words, not invariably silly, about Matthew Arnold, Pater, Cavafy, Lawrence, Gibbon, Kipling, and Edward Thomas: ‘I am prejudiced beyond all explanation against the poetry, prose, personality, and papa of Edward Thomas ... ’ But the most typical – not the liveliest – letter is one that ...”

“... His investigation of despair is disheartening, to say the least. In the 1853 preface to his Poems, Matthew Arnold, one of the few Victorian writers who (understandably) is not among Alice’s heroes, makes the point with grim authority: What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be ...”

“... where he could safely see life as it is without being seen and could report on that seeing.’ Matthew Arnold, another of Miller’s subjects, presents a different scenario of ambivalent disengagement from a world seen as out there, beyond the control of an always precariously placed observer. Arnold and his poetic ...”

“... sympathy for a while prevail, is the proper conclusion of the poem. A hundred and twenty years ago Matthew Arnold engaged in a controversy with F.W. Newman over the translation of Homer, and his lectures on the subject have been justly admired ever since. Yet English Classicists’ work on Homer has been far closer to Newman, because, I suppose, it is ...”

“... in for the West) and life in Iran is maintained over the course of the novel. Discussing Matthew Arnold with Noosheen, Chloe says that Empedocles represents the ennui and spiritual desolation of the 19th century: ‘he is a symbol of Western man.’ Noosheen Ardeshir is a kind of Irani equivalent of Chloe: married – reasonably unhappily – to ...”

“... But then Hartman is in a difficult position, as a self and as a performing character. Matthew Arnold is still the enemy, yet Hartman is enough of a realist to know that there is at least some truth in Arnold’s conviction that the duty of a critic – social and literary – is to resist the impulses of ...”

“... which is his Anglophile upbringing and the fact that it’s lines from poets like Wilfred Owen and Matthew Arnold that keep coming into his head as he crouches in a trench listening to the noise of guns, or prepares to march to meet the English approaching Port Stanley. The letters contain many allusions to the political climate in Argentina, in which ...”

“... is no consensus on first principles, evading the business of thrashing them out doesn’t help. Matthew Arnold set a precedent for such evasion in his famous essay, ‘The Study of Poetry’, when he conceded his inability to define ‘what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry’, but then went on to say that such ...”

“... value of the open air – but the very ideals of antiquity and the Christian tradition that Matthew Arnold had heard ebbing away from Dover Beach a long time before and that had now entirely dissipated. But people kept reading him, and not just in Scotland. None of the books is perfect, some aren’t good at all, and all are slapdash to an ...”

“... British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of labour. Human ...”

“... a deadweight in my heart.’ Reading Betjeman one is reminded of country and western music, and Matthew Arnold: Ah, whose hand that day through Heaven guided Man’s new spirit, since it was not me? Ah, who sway’d our choice, and who decided What our gifts, and what our wants should be? For, alas! he left us each retaining Shreds of gifts which he ...”