“... had been applied to the human race by W.C. Wells in 1813, and extended to other species by Patrick Matthew in 1831. Darwin hoped, however, to do some service to science by bringing these elements together in a single arc of argument, supported by masses of detailed observations. In the event he never completed the ‘big book’, but in 1859 he published an ...”

“... a sacred text, and articles by Stephen could claim to have been one of the provocations that led Matthew Arnold to write some of the essays that became Culture and Anarchy, though both these connections suggest his secondary status. He is, apparently, assured of a place in the history of legal thought for his writings on the criminal law, and the fact that ...”

“... spot that her cry, ‘We saved our living standards; our jobs we could not save,’ is a crib from Matthew 27:42, but I don’t believe that this gives it ‘irrefragable authority’. It would be more use to point out that the current snooker boom attracts workers to watch on TV prize-money bonanzas sponsored by various capitalist firms, and that Steve ...”

“... produced in a single instant of scholarly insight. Chapman’s version is quite different. Like Christopher Logue’s violent adaptations of the Iliad, it testifies to a lifetime’s battle with thoughts and afterthoughts, a continual argument between the translator’s own preoccupations and his sense of what is distinctive to Homer. Chapman’s project ...”

“... with Siberian Tannu Tuva throat-singers. Infinity (1996) is a miserable Hollywood movie, starring Matthew Broderick, about Feynman’s time as a very young man helping to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos: ‘He was no ordinary genius. Theirs was no ordinary love.’ Alan Alda played Feynman in Peter Parnell’s well-received New York stage play QED. ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... opened to researchers. Over the last forty years, and especially since its digitisation by Adam Matthew, the archive has become a vital resource for historians of mid-century Britain. The characteristics that irritated wartime officials and postwar social scientists – its methodological eclecticism, its political promiscuity, the sheer dottiness of some ...”

“... performance, the long-breath rant with its doomsday imagery, its wild repetitions in the mode of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, persuaded Ferlinghetti to send a telegram paraphrasing the note from Emerson to Whitman from the appendix to Leaves of Grass. ‘I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCrIPT OF “HOWL”?’ Howl ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to discuss a year ago are now being discussed by the man who will be our next prime minister.’ Matthew Goodwin, a presenter on GB News, read off a litany of violent crimes committed by asylum seekers and implored the audience to ‘take back your country’, promising to ‘weaponise these issues all day long’. It was time to ‘start putting the ...”

“... been harried by vigilante groups of scholarly theorists trying to pass on their own obsessions. Matthew Arnold set the agenda for modern versions when he insisted Homer should be pacy, noble and plain. Since then, the Oralists have insisted the text should also somehow reflect the ‘orality’ of the poems, which often comes down to a more urgent ...”

“... is spoken of’, and the reader, rolling around ‘singular pitch’, murmurs to himself: ‘Christopher Ricks.’ Nothing is more Ricksian than Hill’s phrase in The Triumph of Love about Ruskin’s ‘wedded/incapacity’ (meaning, at least primarily, his famous disappointment on his wedding-night):                   Ruskin’s ...”

“... more, or rather differently, scandalous to the Victorians: ‘What a set! What a world!’ Matthew Arnold’s verdict spoke for his generation’s high-minded disdain for their parents and the Vanity Fair of the Regency. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that she would not wish even to touch Annabella’s hand, as if degeneracy were contagious. Prim ...”

“... Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the blame to Indian ‘agents and accomplices’, and a substantial number of post-colonial Indian and non-Indian historians who hold the Empire ...”

“... 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 ...”