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“... Our own understanding of Aristotle is filtered not through those early commentators, but through Matthew Arnold, who first suggested that the tragic hero required a fatal flaw. Aristotle states simply that he (or they – he isn’t really concerned with the tragic hero) makes a mistake: such as marrying his mother, or killing Polonius instead of the ...”

“... this way of thinking. Fire and brimstone evangelists like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and ...”

“... a sacred text, and articles by Stephen could claim to have been one of the provocations that led Matthew Arnold to write some of the essays that became Culture and Anarchy, though both these connections suggest his secondary status. He is, apparently, assured of a place in the history of legal thought for his writings on the criminal law, and the fact ...”

“... 1879, ‘Oriental’ poetry received a final fillip with the publication of Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s life of the Buddha, told in narrative verse. As early as 1817, Moore had received the unheard-of sum of 3000 guineas as an advance for his poem Lalla Rookh; now, Light of Asia became an immense success on both sides of the Atlantic, and was reprinted ...”

“... was an uncharacteristic act of aggression, which freed him to finish his stalled dissertation on Matthew Arnold. ‘Lionel was writing like a man,’ Grinberg concludes. But this attempt at male self-possession didn’t last. In 1947, Trilling published The Middle of the Journey, an interesting but excessively mild novel about an ex-communist (based on ...”

“... should be so largely unknown to readers of strict literary interests. A general impression from Matthew Arnold will not do. The major verse of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the romances of Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (in English the Mabinogion) are evident classics in the writing of this island. Moreover the interest of several Welsh verse forms is ...”

“... soon established themselves in the eisteddfodau, to the civil surprise of observers like Matthew Arnold. In doing all this, Hutton says flatly, Iolo ‘at once betrayed his friends and his country’, while there is a special irony in his personal motto, Y Gwir Yn Erbyn Y Byd, ‘The Truth against the World’. Nevertheless, his institutions ...”

“... resistance to interpretation, is a peculiar species of dissent. In 1873, in Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold – an avid student himself of the Gita – wrote that ‘the language of the Bible is fluid, passing and literary, not rigid, fixed and scientific.’ Gandhi unwittingly echoed him when he admitted that he read the Gita primarily as ...”

“... of slaughter to the spirit of the age, and its lamentable loss of faith. Like their contemporary Matthew Arnold, they saw the sea of faith receding, leaving exposed not the towers of the great cathedrals, but that monstrous symbol of secular modernity, the Eiffel Tower, which arose in part as a response to Sacré-Coeur, and which they hated with a ...”

“... which the mass media were able to supply. What the public wants was the title of a 1909 play by Arnold Bennett, usefully disinterred at the beginning of this book, which focuses on the politics of public taste in a modern democracy. In Bennett’s play Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron, becomes the patron of a progressive theatre-manager, Holt St ...”

“... were austere.) What was he doing as a staunch defender of a Classical education and an admirer of Matthew Arnold? But Anderson had been a Marxist out of his hatred of servility – which, following Nietzsche and Sorel, he took to be as characteristic of Christianity as of ‘the servile state’. His hope was that all would come to share in the life of ...”

“... Towards the end, the redemptive power of literature comes crashing onto the stage in the person of Matthew Arnold. ‘Dover Beach’ plays a crucial role, and in one sense it’s a well-chosen poem: the confused alarms and ignorant armies chime nicely with the novel’s public themes. But even McEwan’s powers of persuasion can’t make the scene in ...”

“... poetry is the lyric.’Giving a useful biographical sketch of Palgrave (an Oxford pal of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, and an admirer of Tennyson), Bucknell relates his professional work in English adult education to a growing passion for ‘England’s native literature … English history and the values of the English people’. After ...”

“... that sometimes translations take fire and sometimes they misfire. No, ‘this is not Homer,’ as Matthew Arnold complained, since it frequently adds phrases and whole lines to Homer and sometimes simply gets him wrong; but for Chapman, translation is a dialectic between one life, one civilisation, and another. Chapman came to believe that ‘of all ...”

“... after by publishers, loved by a wide readership and reviled by Bloomsbury. When he succeeded to Arnold Bennett’s reviewing pulpit in the Evening Standard in 1932, it confirmed his place as the spokesman for what was sometimes denigrated as a plain-mannish or middlebrow taste for social realism. As the literary hot property of the moment, a writer firmly ...”