“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon ...”

“... progressed, followed similar lines, with a newly-militant Nonconformity rampant in the North (Matthew Arnold takes up arms against it in Culture and Anarchy), while Anglicanism cultivated the Barsetshire parishes. Politically, as students of electoral geography have shown, the North-South divide was almost as apparent in Mid-Victorian times as it was to ...”