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“... industry. Just try finding a book on ‘the English identity’ in Foyle’s or Black-well’s. Bruce Arnold, a political commentator for the Irish Independent, has now added his contribution to this profusion, What Kind of Country, subtitled ‘Modern Irish Politics 1968-1983’.* This book was the subject of a particularly vitriolic review in the ...”

“... He had everything going for him until the first crisis arose and the North blew up in 1969. Bruce Arnold has been a commentator on Irish political and cultural life for the past thirty years. He writes about politics using logic and reason, which is unusual in Ireland. He is able to write about certain Irish political figures with a respect which ...”

“... like his brother, to be hailed, even by the non-Irish, as great in the more absolute sense. That Bruce Arnold has a profound admiration for his subject is evident from the minute care of his research, but he avoids idolatry, and this measure of reserve lends credibility to his estimate of the painter’s stature. His text may be too long, too ...”

“... having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when he was 14; his temporary blindness three years later; and – most damaging – the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was 20. These traumas resurface, symptomatically, everywhere in his fiction. Julia’s ...”

“... they were not so different from those of his middle-class friends. You can just imagine Matthew Arnold sighing: ‘What a set!’ But now the temptation is to say, hopelessly, that they should all, gentry and peasant, be left alone for a century or two. Maddox has some pages about the Australian episode, and so, naturally, does the Cambridge editor of ...”

“... Gramsci is rather strange here, since the writer whom Rushdie is indisputably echoing is Matthew Arnold. Although ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, Arnold’s great poem on the ‘two worlds’ trope, seems profoundly antipathetic to Rushdie’s temper, it has some relevance to the dilemma in which the novelist ...”

“... dirty postcards in a drawer’. Then I remembered the line by which the same poet skewered Matthew Arnold: ‘And thrust his gift in prison till it died’. Sparrow was a man who appeared to have had every girt handed him by the gods: unshakeable homosexuality – no pram in the hall to make war on his early promise; brutal, but stunning handsomeness; an exact ...”

“... Bennett and Mrs Brown’, which urges the development of new narrative techniques and criticises Arnold Bennett and other Edwardian novelists for doing exactly what Hall does throughout The Unlit Lamp: deduce identity from a description of environment and appearance. Literary scholars have tended to take Woolf’s word for it. They have on the whole been as ...”

“... rather than snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment’. Bruce Bernard, who knew Freud from adolescence, also described the portraits as ‘prophetic’. ‘In the past,’ Blackwood wrote in 1993, ‘this was not so obvious because his prophecies had not yet become so dire and grim. When I used to sit for him nearly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... identity of the villain who thrust the New Statesman out of Eden is correspondingly various, with Bruce Page remaining by far the most popular whipping-boy, but with minority lobbies also fingering Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and all the other post-Sixties editors. There is little disagreement, however, about when the glory days began. The New Statesman ...”

“... both . . . Audiences embraced this new style of movie, and the genre would revive the careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and make international box-office stars out of Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis. Although it is tempting to align de Bernières with Gabriel García Márquez, whose work was also ...”

“... scandalously omitted from both the Yale and Oxford collections, and often wrongly attributed to Bruce Forsyth) for individual contributors, and what do they tell us about what’s now thought of as a ‘quotation’? Might they even cast light on the cultural biases of the Yale Book?The scores reveal implied value judgments aplenty. Don’t buy shares in ...”

“... Australia. At which point, they should turn to the poets. For just as the Songlines are, to use Bruce Chatwin’s image, ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” [is] readable’, so the quick and shallow tracks of tourism retrace our oldest myths, revisiting ancient holy sites, seeking out a ...”

“... other hand, for the first 21 years of their marriage, Alma supported them both, selling dresses at Arnold Constable, Macy’s and Lord & Taylor. She seems to have been the one who handled financial matters, while Singer hid behind the persona of humble immigrant. In his old age and after his death, she would pester friends to get better deals on royalties, or ...”