“... 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 ...”

“... music away in the cloisters.’Even those cloisters had not been encouraging. Sydney Smith, a canon of St Paul’s from 1831 until his death in 1845, complained that ‘it is enough if our music is decent … we are here to pray, and the singing is a very subordinate consideration.’ Churches of most denominations proceed along those lines to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1864, he won a Snell Exhibition, which had sent many brilliant students – not least Adam Smith – from Glasgow University to Balliol College, Oxford. The high churchmanship of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop ...”

“... book, Writing Degree Zero, with Elements of Semiology, was translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in 1967, and this volume is now reissued. The Fashion System appears in English for the first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the ...”

“... sympathy and calculated advantage, as described by moral economists like Hobbes, Rousseau and Adam Smith, self-love will be transformed into social benevolence. Your affections will spread like ivy, till at last the whole world is clasped in their tenacious tendrils and covered with your verdant love. In the end you may even shed all sense of separate selfhood ...”

“... from different points on the Marxist-communist-anarcho-syndicalist spectrum – Callum Cant and Matthew Lee, Edd Mustill – want to draw lessons and inspiration from the strike. Their books focus mainly on the unions, taking it for granted that the establishment wanted to dominate the working classes. Studies by two academics, David Torrance and Jonathan ...”

“... of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some 16th-century Lord Butler justifying his master much as Tebbit and Bell are doing this evening. ‘It was unfortunate, of ...”

“... eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther ...”

“... in the leader columns. The paper was repeating a giddy pattern set in the autumn. On 28 October Matthew Parris, the politician turned journalist, said in passing to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that Mandelson was gay. He wasn’t breaking a confidence: the News of the World had outed the minister in the Eighties. But there had been no public reference to his ...”

“... to wider civil rights, for Catholics, Jews, black slaves and more. In addition, though, and as Matthew Arnold argued in Culture and Anarchy, late Georgian and early Victorian liberalism, far from diluting Protestant complacencies, as some of its leading proponents hoped, actually reinforced them, because Protestantism was so often posited as the natural ...”

“... Bewildered readers may remember the way the Mitford sisters described their ‘Farve’, Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods peer who boasted that he had only read one book in his life, who sometimes hunted his daughters with hounds, and who spoke for all Sarmatians when he said: ‘Abroad is ...”