“... 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 ...”

“... life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsOn 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 ...”

“... view of the period. He might also have marked those optimistic economists such as Adam Smith, who remarked in The Wealth of Nations on ‘the universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. Britain around this time is portrayed by Gatrell as a chronically unsettled country. There had been two hundred sedition trials in ...”

“... more conceptually refined, from that conveyed by the earliest major work on the subject, Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (revised edition, 1900, unmentioned by Bond). Smith was a remarkable observer, and in spite of being a missionary was quite unsqueamish about such customs as the practice of Chinese mothers and ...”

“... review of the 2007 exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum, in which Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the New York Times, declared Ramírez ‘one of the greatest artists of the 20th century’. Ramírez had an indelible style built on a supreme sense of economy and shot through with a mix of sly humour and sunny optimism that coats ...”

“... 1950s he lived in Italy, where he became friends with Auden; later he taught at Bard College, Smith College, the University of Rochester and Georgetown. His first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones, was published in 1954. In 1968 he won the Pulitzer for his next volume, The Hard Hours. His Collected Earlier Poems were published in 1990; his Collected ...”

“... with flying colours. Similarly, he writes elsewhere in that book that as a young man he loved Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Sohrab and Rustum’: ‘I found it deeply moving, even the parts that sophisticates might consider sentimental.’ (I’m with him there.) And you sense no higher praise could be earned by Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century ...”

“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... a boy in Leeds, this Monday in Easter week was always noteworthy for a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Leeds Parish Church, which I dutifully attended as one of a party from my church youth club. It was dutiful because half the evening – and more than half – I used to find tedious to a degree, as I never appreciated the beauty or the appeal ...”

“... comment on Spanish activity in the Falklands from l774 to 1811. In 1809 Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith reported that Viceroy Liniers had deported the leaders of the Buenos Aires cabildo, or town council, to ‘the Maloinas or Falkland Islands’. In the same year he assured Liniers that ‘Great Britain would aim at neither sovereignty nor territorial ...”

“... trustees would not countenance an agnostic headmaster. Mary Ward intervened. Her publisher, George Smith, enriched by Elsmere and its successors, was the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine. Thanks to Mrs Ward’s influence, Leonard was taken on in 1901. He would eventually become editor.Released from her matron’s duties at Charterhouse, Julia took out a ...”

“... like Macmillans’ Magazine or the Fortnightly Review, titbits from Herbert Spencer, Comte or Matthew Arnold, snatches of Max Muller on solar myths or Mahaffy on Greece, pages of Carlyle’s French Revolution, 75 maxims of Balthasar Gracian: the notebooks are a giant sampler of the thought of his time (often the more po-faced and tedious utterances of the ...”

“... plausible arguments about how we should cope with our supposedly post-truth age. We are urged by Matthew d’Ancona (b. 1968) to go back to the Enlightenment. Get our facts straight. Line up the documents. Fact-check. The liars will lose. Such arguments are typically put forward by people who, like me (b. 1963) and Knausgaard (b. 1968), are too old to be ...”

“... to linger in the vicinity of Blyth today, and are still in some sense local, like the Ridleys.Matthew White Ridley, the fifth in a line of Viscount Ridleys called Matthew, has his main home at the family seat of Blagdon Hall, halfway between Blyth and Newcastle Airport. Blyth’s main park is called Ridley Park. Ian ...”