“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the side altars will seize the main pulpit ... to lecture the vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they ...”

“... A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes ...”

“... un bon patron,’ he began his career in physics as the pupil of Germany’s greatest teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld.In the early Twenties, atomic physics was dominated by Niels Bohr’s model of electrons circling like planets around the sun-like nucleus, their concentric orbits governed by Newtonian mechanics combined with Max Planck’s quantum ...”

“... Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It’s not so much that he said anything obviously ...”

“... particularly on chat shows – got wilder and longer so that one had the nauseating spectacle of David Frost, for instance, standing supposedly touched and surprised by the audience’s unexpected warmth, the shouts of the PAs now become whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the ...”

“... her and said that the introductions were too much for him. (I’m told that after Professor Arnold Davidson’s introduction on Monday, Derrida had said: ‘I could cry ... but I won’t.’)The lecture, clearly built on the previous ones, did not seem to require them. Like an episode of a soap opera, it repeated much of what had preceded it. The focus ...”

“... of champagne levity, several can-can kicks away from the gritty moral earnestness for which the Arnold-Eliot-Leavis critical junta was avid. To base a revised version of the history of English on such liabilities, voices from beyond the Cam might snarl, is more than mistaken. It hints at perfidy of industrial strength. Much depends, of course, on what you ...”

“... 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 their ...”

“... that the young trainee (now devouring Aldous Huxley and Dornford Yates, and trying to write like Arnold Bennett) might be of use in the publicity department, and there he pulled off a coup demanding a fusion of technical knowledge and showmanship: he managed not only to sell a dud line in underpowered headlamps but to create a demand for more. Now he did ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

“... and Ethiopia’ that was published in the collection A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (edited by David Reynolds), and they also feature in Folsom’s excellent introduction to this facsimile edition of the first book publication of Democratic Vistas. Spurred into prose by Carlyle’s taunts and barbs, Whitman set himself the task of composing three essays ...”

“... and antisemitic that he was interned in 1940 along with Oswald Mosley. Another fascisant MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, chose expiation by enlisting in the RAF. Having somewhat surprisingly been accepted as a tail-gunner at the age of 55, he was killed when his bomber came down in France, but his memory inspired the character of Pilot Officer Sir George Corbett in ...”

“... to a similar protest meeting at the old Mechanics’ Institute, where one of the speakers was Mrs Arnold Kettle. The Kettles were well-known left-wingers, Arnold Kettle a Communist and lecturer in English at the university. They lived not far from us in Headingley and were eventually, though not I think at this ...”

“... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the ...”