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“... with that world of financial services and consultancies which floated on the oil. At best we were Matthew Arnolds’s ‘remnant’. Class counted. In retrospect, this episode recalled the subterranean Institute in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where the delegates to an interminable conference spectate on the external world via an immense camera obscura. Gray ...”

“... copyright law; there were the pioneering academics of Enlightenment Scotland, among them Adam Smith, who made ‘rhetoric and belles lettres’ a university discipline and exported it to North America. As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656-1736). With his hard-nosed nephew Jacob the younger (1682-1735), Tonson dominated the ...”

“... much. Iris Murdoch’s argument ‘collapses the moment you give it the slightest prod’. Chris Smith, defending Blair’s invitation to Noel Gallagher, claimed that the prime minister was also deeply moved by King Lear, which is a ‘banal and evasive piece of claptrap’. With so much at stake, claptrap is the last thing we need; clear thinking on the ...”

“... from the Philological Society and the biographical dictionary from the commercial publisher George Smith. With these two projects OUP inherited a curatorial responsibility which has, over the years, become increasingly burdensome. Unlike the National Heritage Commission, OUP has the task not just of conserving important national properties – that is to ...”

“... Seward and the Lunar Society, whose members also included Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Day, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. William Hutton was also in touch with the ‘Lunatics’ and hence not merely with advanced scientific, religious, educational and political ideas but with a new sense of the shifting balance of social and ...”

“... to Inglis because the family had already given his papers to the Welsh historian, Dai Smith), or the records of the organisations in which he worked – John McIlroy, in his fine study of Williams in adult education, the basis of Inglis’s Chapters 6 and 7, though he contrives not to mention it in his acknowledgments, draws liberally on the ...”

“... patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all Sons of Man, if not of David in particular. Matthew starts with Abraham and arranges the ancestors in three neat groups: fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon; fourteen from the exile to the Christ. The two gospels are in concordance between Abraham and ...”

“... from getting worse. To complete the cast of characters, and to promote continuity, we have Colonel Matthew Maddox, an honourable Englishman and the subject of an assassination attempt in book one, The Killing of Yesterday’ s Children, winkled out of Berkshire by a brigadier who tells him that his country needs him – needs him, in fact, to liaise with the ...”

“... a kind of literary quilt, and also that names, if they are made up of ordinary terms (word, smith, gold, worth), may revert without warning to their ordinary life.Wordsworth doesn’t juggle with his name as other writers do: Shakespeare, for example, has plenty of fun with will, and Donne, speaking of the forgiveness of sins, writes: ‘When thou hast ...”

“... just ‘because the Germans mucked up twice in a century’. The soi-disant anti-elitist tribune Matthew Goodwin – who ate pages of his own book on Sky News after losing a bet he had made about Labour’s 2017 general election performance – claimed that over the last fifty years ‘the left’ had successfully prioritised ‘the interests of big business ...”

“... of the theatrical potential of language. Even personal letters – like this to his friend William Smith – turn into imaginative performance: Infallible Doctor,   Let this apologize for long silence. – Your request would have been long since granted, but I know not what it is best to compose: a Hindica-syllabum carmen ...”

“... Diana a few days apart. In 1998 members travelled to Laramie, Wyoming to picket the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who had been tortured and beaten to death. It was their first funeral stunt, and its astounding cruelty (Shepard’s parents couldn’t be protected from hearing their jeering chants) got the attention of CNN. They had discovered ...”

“... never seemed to arrive anywhere. ‘You are too content to fluctuate,’ his friend and rival Matthew Arnold once rebuked him, ‘to be ever learning, never coming to the knowledge of the truth.’ As one of Clough’s most sympathetic 19th-century readers, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, observed, he was a man who would neither ‘heartily accept mundane ...”

“... 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 ...”