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“... to ‘a’? Quoting the same sentence in his preface to the full set of new translations, Christopher Prendergast writes: ‘all paradises are lost paradises.’ This is impeccably aphoristic, and assumes that false paradises are just not paradises at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything may be ...”

“... that anybody as stupid as that has ever been granted the friendship of Donald Davie. Ian Watt and Matthew Hodgart, who are the friends who had just been mentioned in the vicinity of Voltaire, have been able to write as well as they have done about Conrad and about Johnson just because their respect for the Enlightenment has never been so fatuous as to ...”

“... evidence of gross degeneracy – the same fate, incidentally, as that of an analogous character in Matthew Kneale’s novel English Passengers. Gould, meanwhile, is accused of the doctor’s murder and sent to the prison in which he begins to write his manuscript. Before he sets to work, though, he makes another discovery. Climbing through the space left by a ...”

“... extent filled in by Surviving, a book of Green’s uncollected writings edited by his grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at ...”

“... But then Hartman is in a difficult position, as a self and as a performing character. Matthew Arnold is still the enemy, yet Hartman is enough of a realist to know that there is at least some truth in Arnold’s conviction that the duty of a critic – social and literary – is to resist the impulses of the age, or the community, whenever they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Revolutionary Tribunal, Fouquier-Tinville, to whom one of Breton’s colleagues once compared him. Matthew Josephson described him as resembling ‘one of the old Jacobin leaders’. The real give-away came from Breton himself: denouncing Tzara, he observed that ‘it would not be a bad thing to re-institute the laws of the Terror for the things of the ...”

“... to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold loosely divided English society into three classes, the Philistines (the middle classes), the Populace (the working classes) and the Barbarians (the aristocracy). In ...”

“... and ‘Evidence in the Eliot Case’ (1996) – this last featuring a notably unkind commentary on Christopher Ricks’s editing of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17. In the new book, as in these essays, Raine assumes that his readers are likely to be ‘somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues’. It is my impression that he remained ...”

“... white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of Englishmen have made the pilgrimage to the ...”

“... all – his pay went up to £312,000. Slough Estates’ remuneration committee was chaired by Sir Christopher Harding, chairman of BET, whose own remuneration committee brought him up to £540,000. Sir Christopher is now chairman of the remuneration committee at GEC, which recently decided on a remuneration package for a ...”

“... biblical scholarship and how cholera is spread as well as the imperial mission civilisatrice. Matthew Webb, the central figure in The Singapore Grip, chooses similarly inopportune moments to puzzle over British capital’s effects on South-East Asia. But Farrell’s most characteristic ploy is to embody abstractions in comically proliferating ...”

“... a farm servant at Penhale on the north edge of Bodmin Moor, whose throat was cut by her workmate Matthew Weeks in 1844 (several thousand people turned up to watch him hang); and of Christopher Atkinson, vicar of Danby in Cleveland, who walked 140,000 miles to visit his parishioners and to carry out his own ...”

“... remember Ruskin’s murmur: ‘I am afraid Wordsworth was often affected in his simplicity.’ Or Matthew Arnold’s insistence that what in Wordsworth is true simplicity can become in Tennyson the affected thing, simplesse:French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful and ...”

“... too self-conscious. ‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way,’ said Matthew Arnold, and such is the great art of biography. One day in mid-March, as Swift sat in his chair, he reached towards a knife. But Mrs Ridgeway moved it away from him. He shrugged his shoulders, rocked himself, and said, ‘I am what I am, I am what I ...”