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“... itself into thin air and creeds are shaken and traditions dissolved at a rate unimagined by Matthew Arnold, people turn to pen and paper for consolation and sustenance? – is as barely credible as (something to which any poetry editor will testify) it is widespread. Here are writers who have spared themselves the discomforts attendant on what ...”

“... leaders elsewhere, Hutchins added concerns of his own. For one thing – one can hear the voice of Matthew Arnold, who has always had an uncommon influence on the rhetoric of American liberal education – there was the ‘flat mediocrity, crass commercialism, narrow politics, irreligion of commonplace affairs’. But in the Thirties new and strange ...”

“... extra-political and extra-social insulation during the period she examines. One need only look at Matthew Arnold or Carlyle to see the use that was made of culture to camouflage and disguise the inhumane goings-on in the colonies (specifically India, Ireland and Jamaica in Arnold’s case, as he droned on about culture ...”

“... about themselves, and in consequence Proust begins to sound like a Victorian sage, a sort of gay Matthew Arnold, dispensing thoughts on music, art history, birthdays, illness, death, ageing, infatuation, time, envy, much more. He does all this, of course, but within the dense texture of a huge (and funny) novel the thoughts don’t come across as ...”

“... But in one respect it is incorrigibly un-modern, and that is in its obligation to be cheerful. Matthew Arnold was not the only 19th-century reader keen to find in Wordsworth’s cheer an answer to the problems of his age, ‘this strange disease of modern life’. But it is just the passages in The Prelude that dwell on indefatigable joy, invoking ...”

“... No Arnold can write a novel; if they could, I should have done it.’ That was Matthew Arnold’s reaction to his niece’s first significant attempt at fiction, Miss Bretherton, published in 1884. It can’t have been very encouraging. But Mary Ward was used to the magisterial arrogance of the Arnold men ...”

“... ceased to exert himself on behalf of his sister-in-law.Geoffrey’s great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which meant that Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle. Geoffrey was born in the spring of 1888 at Toxteth, where his father was principal of Liverpool College. His mother, one of the daughters of Thomas ...”

“... casts a shadow over his work, Park Honan, already the author of Lives of Jane Austen and Matthew Arnold, doesn’t share the diffidence about the status or value of orthodox literary biography that Schoenbaum’s books seem to betray. Shakespeare: A Life, formally speaking, belongs as unabashedly to an older school of Life-writing as its opening ...”

“... Hazlitt’s handling of Abstract Ideas. He recognises, for instance, that it is important that Matthew Arnold used the noun ‘disinterestedness’ where Hazlitt preferred the adjective. To explain Horne Tooke’s subtitle, The Diversions of Purley, we must turn to history. The Rev. John Horne, generally known as Parson Horne, won the favour of the ...”

“... was what the vulgar nine-tenths of the population got up to, that silent majority which Matthew Arnold dubbed the philistines; Arnold’s articulate minority, the intellectuals, were supposed to live for culture and high seriousness. Byron’s approach to literature is as embarrassing in the 20th century as ...”

“... something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style,’ Matthew Arnold said – or so he was quoted as saying in G.W.E. Russell’s Collections and Recollections (1898). Maybe. But perhaps Arnold’s crisp little maxim is only true if you equate style with quotability. The ...”

“... try to combine the doctrine of Parmenides with that of Heraclitus.’ (Well, what a bright idea.) Matthew Arnold sniffily told his mother that Tennyson was ‘deficient in intellectual power’. But, for all that, Tennyson was perfectly assiduous in keeping up with major developments, including scientific discoveries (something of which Auden, who was ...”

“... to wider civil rights, for Catholics, Jews, black slaves and more. In addition, though, and as Matthew Arnold argued in Culture and Anarchy, late Georgian and early Victorian liberalism, far from diluting Protestant complacencies, as some of its leading proponents hoped, actually reinforced them, because Protestantism was so often posited as the ...”

“... depicts the denizens of the Athenaeum in its great days. T.H. Huxley, having left his umbrella at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ...”

“... I wouldn’t be that interested in Yeats’s opinion of my work, whereas I would be interested in Matthew Arnold’s.Is there anyone alive that you feel about in some way as you do about such writers from the past?The whole idea of the companionship of past writers is enacted in the head and on the page, so there are people I still think of as alive, as ...”