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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of Pride, the film, directed by Matthew Warchus, based on the support offered by lesbian and gay groups to the miners during the strike in the 1980s. It’s one of a trio of British films (the others The Full Monty and Brassed Off) spawned by the Thatcher era which benefit from having such a ...”

“... in itself it really is”, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever,’ Matthew Arnold said in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1857). The remark was more question-begging than he liked to think, and Housman, who knew all Arnold’s poetry by heart, was pointedly ...”

“... is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits, in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.’ He felt obliged – an obligation which was part of the pretention of his epoch – to call such insights ‘evidence of the law of antagonism’. But they are shrewd, for all ...”

“... and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist ...”