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“... more will mean worse, is as old as the Industrial Revolution. The classic 19th-century instance is Matthew Arnold’ Culture and Anarchy, with its appeal for the preservation, through education, of the values of ‘sweetness and light’ against the threat posed by the advance of ‘philistinism’, it was within this tradition that the Leavises made ...”

“... grant of £1200. Among them were several distinctly uncommon writers – Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. But the grounds on which awards were made were erratic. Disraeli pensioned the widow of Byron’s gondolier (it did not hurt that she had once been the elder Disraeli’s housekeeper), and one administrator of the fund had a pronounced bias ...”

“... which is a trifold one and flagrantly conflicts with it. Mid-Victorian writers like Thackeray and Matthew Arnold took this in their stride and learned to handle both systems: though plainly they believed much less in the ‘class’ system than they did in the ‘gentleman’ one, and accordingly played much more outrageous games with it. What impresses ...”

“... Christianity gives to the soul’. The very last of Mr Thomas’s log-jam of quotations comes from Matthew Arnold, and is about half-hearted, ineffectual folk in need of a word from On High: ‘Light half-believers of our casual creeds’, Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose tomorrow the ground won today. But the author, too, is still rather ...”

“... it is well managed, both as duly curbed and as duly given play. Naipaul has long possessed what Matthew Arnold praised in Dryden and himself manifested in the moment of praise: ‘a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how’. But the prose of The Enigma of Arrival is a new departure and arrival, though entirely continuous with the old ...”

“... be seen as laziness or perfidy, but merely as the constraints of genre. ‘Plenty of people,’ as Matthew Arnold remarked, ‘will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual conditions of the masses.’ Fair enough: Parsons is dishing up traditional plain fare and one ...”

“... passage from the same source: ‘Pioneers, O, Pioneers!’ Another follows, quoting a poem from Matthew Arnold that evidently has bitten him … And for some of us as we sit listening, a new door opens.Who could be impervious to the romance of this scene? Goldman, who spent five years teaching adult tutorial classes in ‘Tawney’s job’ at ...”

“... who shaped ‘the mood of their age’: inter alia, Carlyle, Ruskin, Cardinal Manning and Matthew Arnold. They’re here because, as Dicey saw, they are identified with a collectivist turn in Victorian thinking. All four, along with Mill, were in Marquand’s phrase ‘custodians of the public conscience’. Keynes is a friend for obvious ...”

“... of Ruskin and the affectation of Wilde, and could embrace both the public enlightenment of Matthew Arnold and the personal aestheticism of that donnish subversive, Walter Pater. Despite the party costume, Stamp tells us that Scott disapproved of Pater’s effeminacy. Fear of effeminacy runs like a phobia through his thinking and art. For ...”

“... would further alienate the court. Then, in a fine ‘return upon himself’ (the phrase with which Matthew Arnold famously commended Burke for such self-questioning), he reflects on his timorously conventional reaction. These young men and women weren’t here simply to try to escape convictions; they were here to demonstrate conviction. They were being ...”

“... the word Victorian, that is to say it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts and Matthew Arnold’. No mention of the pre-Raphaelites, who presumably exemplified the worst sense of ‘Victorian’.Stanford was the most ubiquitous and influential musician in the country for several decades. Among many other things he helped to establish ...”

“... the how and the when and who it takes with it are not certain. In​ ‘On Translating Homer’ Matthew Arnold described Homer as ‘eminently noble’, ‘eminently rapid’ and ‘eminently plain and direct’ in style and ideas. Homer ‘has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky’. These assertions are ...”

“... What’s the big deal about precision as an end in itself? As Stoppard archly knows – and as Arnold and Ruskin and Pater and Wilde and Housman knew in rather different ways – so much hangs on the question of accuracy. Or what fantasies of accuracy are used to do.‘“To see the object as in itself it really is”, has been justly said to be the aim of ...”

“... valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little Arnold Bennett arriviste appearance”.’ If Chelsea (and Oxford) might be at odds with Bloomsbury (and Cambridge) for territorial competitive reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad blood. ‘Never tell lies,’ the young Connolly had adjured ...”

“... down their opposition to Maastricht in return for being allowed to take control of education.) Matthew Arnold famously spoke of Europe as being ‘for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation’, and all the major English theorists of the literary heritage see it as a European, not a narrowly English entity. In this classical ...”