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“... invested biblical landscapes with the elegiac force of childhood experience. The Hellenist Matthew Arnold pointed out in his contemptuous analysis of Nonconformist Hebraism that the fervours of chapel-goers were often rooted in provincial experience. He was not wrong, though he failed to see that this might be part of the point. Despite the ...”

“... Eliot derived his poetics from the French Symbolists, so that it was impossible for him to follow Matthew Arnold in finding a solution to spiritual turbulence in poetry as such. The language of poetry cannot deliver a solution of this kind, indeed cannot even comment authoritatively on such a condition, since to be persuasive – which is to say, for ...”

“... on a damp day in May, I reflect that Keith Joseph is poised to close down a dozen tutorials on Matthew Arnold and that Holub speaks also to this society. He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those ...”

“... them. A timid Tamil schoolmaster makes an unlikely adventurer in ‘Buried Lives’. Taking Matthew Arnold to heart (‘But there’s a something in this breast’), he breaks out of his stale existence and makes for the unknown satisfactions of the West. Against all expectations, including his own, it looks as though he might succeed. The last ...”

“... England and America, and productive of a great deal of latterday ‘chatter about Harriet’, as Matthew Arnold had called it in deploring Shelley and his circle. What a set they had been, he said, and what a set was involved in the New Apocalypse, the wartime couplings of Fitzrovia and Poetry London. ‘Talent’ and the behaviour that went with it was ...”

“... the nasty label ‘confessional’. A bit of 1910, a bit of 1960, and a bit of 1860 in the stately Matthew Arnold (Hamilton’s current subject as a biographer) crumble of the lines. They are physical, without losing themselves in materialist drift; scenic without being pretty; verbally effective but not finical or clever for the sake of it. Thought ...”

“... and Edward King, or Thomas Gray and Richard West, or Shelley and Keats, or Tennyson and Hallam, or Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough? The aesthetic difference is, of course, that Halleck’s poem ‘On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake’ is a paltry thing in comparison with Lycidas or the Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard or Adonais or In Memoriam or ...”

“... but no Punjabi poetry, and who sprinkles his work with epigraphs, allusions and references (to Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Kipling, Heaney, Orwell). In the exorbitantly titled ‘Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch 22 for “Black” Writers . . .’, a father takes to task – with some justice – the GCSE poetry anthology ...”

“... literature an internal thing, special to us’ (my emphasis). Some great poems are quoted much as Matthew Arnold quoted his ‘touchstones’, with obvious assurance that they affect others as they do Carey. Can it be true that literature alone has such powers, such an obvious appeal to both imagination and reason? At the end of this absorbing and ...”

“... failed attempts used to clog second-hand bookshops; now they are more mercifully pulped. What Matthew Arnold set out so splendidly for the translator of Homer has not been tried for Horace, but it is easy enough to isolate some essential characteristics of the original which any serious translator is bound to try to recapture: the writing is ...”

“... it. His approach tended to be, in Donoghue’s arch but apt phrase, ‘free of empirical duty’. Matthew Arnold and Modern Science could give you the object as in itself it really was; could give you the best, the most reliable, salutary truths. What Pater gave you were his impressions and his style. And his style unashamedly competed for attention with ...”

“... churchmen in the select Metaphysical Society and engaged in high-profile exchanges with his friend Matthew Arnold about the respective claims of science and literature in education. When a magisterial statement was needed on ethics and evolution, it was the ageing Huxley who provided it in his Romanes Lecture for 1893. The celebrity Darwinian of the 1860s ...”

“... from nowhere’ of Barrie’s phrase. He was steeped in Browning and Tennyson, admired Emerson and Matthew Arnold, and studied Sidney Lanier on metre. Kipling’s failure to learn about the British Empire, and about the British electorate on which its central direction depended, was not entirely attributable to circumstances outside his control. As the ...”

“... were many, they were not so different from those of his middle-class friends. You can just imagine Matthew Arnold sighing: ‘What a set!’ But now the temptation is to say, hopelessly, that they should all, gentry and peasant, be left alone for a century or two. Maddox has some pages about the Australian episode, and so, naturally, does the Cambridge ...”

“... lists we read: ‘1862. Publication of Salammbô. Succès fou. Sainte-Beuve writes to Matthew Arnold: “Salammbô is our great event!” ...’ But if you turn up Sainte-Beuve’s long review of that novel, in the Everyman edition, you will find that the English translator introduces it as ‘an interesting glimpse of the great critic in one ...”