“... disegno at naught. At the end of the century a good judge could see nothing in Caravaggio’s St Matthew pictures but ‘the thought of Giorgione’. The mysterious avant-gardism and the impression of a Lombard current flowing strongly towards the future are due to the fact that Venice and the Veneto offered to European painting the 17th-century revolution ...”

“... Andy Warhol?, a book so deeply off you wouldn’t feed it to Oscar de la Renta’s dogs. Here’s Matthew Tinkcom. ‘Camp is the alibi for gay-inflected labour to be caught in the chain of value-coding within capitalist political economies... I would suggest that Camp is more productively seen in relation to what it says about bourgeois representation (and ...”

“... been. The funeral procession in London, arranged at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to ...”

“... of England’, and is faced with the alarming task of imposing balance and order on a field like Matthew Arnold’s two Hinkseys, in which nothing stays the same. Professor Hirst has for some time cast himself as the advocate of balance in 17th-century historiography; and part of the interest of reading this book is in seeing wherein he believes balance to ...”

“... slower to change. The third – that ME is a psychological illness – continues to be contested. Matthew Hotopf, of the Institute of Psychiatry, recently described ME as ‘a grey area’. Appearing on ITV’s Link, Hotopf said: ‘The main thing about ME is that it cannot be understood by any single biological or psychological mechanism. You have to have an ...”

“... boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled ...”

“... survived more than a decade as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite scientist: between 1982 and 1996 Matthew Noble’s bust occupied a place of honour in the entrance hall at Number Ten. His stock has risen slowly and steadily; compare this with the Nasdaq-esque slumps and booms of Darwin’s posthumous standing. Like ...”

“... purchaser might destroy the heritage. She won a charity raffle prize, a stay at a resort owned by Francis Ford Coppola, and invited Ferlinghetti along. In a ‘run-down beach motel’ the poet composes ‘At Sea’ and dedicates it to Neruda, whom he published for the first time in Rexroth’s translation of Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile in ...”

“... so bizarre that even Tory commentators felt the need for some quasi-anthropological explanation. Matthew Parris related the fall of Thatcher as a ‘tribal folk-mystery’, a variant of those described by Frazer: ‘The tribe mourned her departure. Not falsely or without feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her ...”

“... Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally gone mad, and former disciples such as Matthew Arnold denounced him as frankly dangerous, a ‘moral desperado’. Some of the mud stuck. It was soon apparent that he was unwholesomely fascinated by Blood and Iron. In 1874, at Bismarck’s behest, the Kaiser conferred on him the Prussian Order of ...”

“... whereabout it would come in.’ The National Portrait Gallery has a fine snapshot (taken by Colin Matthew) of the architectural historian Howard Colvin in the ruins of Godstow Abbey: spectacles pushed up on his forehead, camera dangling from one hand, he looks down intently as he makes a neat entry in the notebook he has just fished from his pocket. I have ...”

“... that Sandby ‘did not get beyond topography and the mere tinted imitation of nature’; of Francis Jukes, on the other hand, Sandby’s friend and the engraver of some of his works, Redgrave wrote that he ‘began art as a topographical landscape painter, but by great perseverance raised himself to much distinction as an aquatint engraver’. Better to ...”

“... an account, Burrow observes, which seems so convincing, yet does not convince; the scurrilities of Matthew Paris, not least about Matthew’s own abbey at St Albans, plagued for a while by dodgy builders and a crooked monk who died shouting ‘Take him, Satan!’ on a distant privy; Jocelin de Brakelonde’s contributions to ...”

“... a generous division of whatever artefacts they found. Amelia Edwards’s protégé, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, leveraged this into a worldwide system of subscriber-based support, with the result that artefacts from Petrie’s excavations can today be found in 26 countries across five continents. A museum, school or individual gave a sum of money ...”