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“... 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 ...”

“... the lawn, beneath the totem pole I’d brought back from Nevada, and painted white and black, to ward off ghouls, ghosts and evil men. I had Coltrane playing from the hallway and was humming along. The black cat was poking and hissing at the white cat, when a crow landed a couple of feet away. Both cats scarpered when he opened his beak and cawed, dropping a ...”

“... public life of 19th-century Britain: second and favourite son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, brother of Matthew and William Delafield Arnold, brother-in-law of W.E. Forster, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... classic linear imperative that characterised the religious quest of Pilgrim’s Progress. What Matthew Arnold detected in their friend the poet Clough, he also found in his younger brother Thomas: a want of ‘rest’. It had all started so well: Tom gained the first at Oxford that eluded both Matthew and Clough; he was ...”

“... A diary, Roland Barthes suggested, provokes in its writer not the tragic question, ‘Who am I?’ but the comic question: ‘Am I?’ This elegant and amused remark goes some way towards explaining why Barthes, who reflected much on his life and published a book called Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, should not have kept a diary. The comic question can’t be confronted, it can only be circumvented, played with, smiled at ...”

“... has fed no grave, all your people are alive. Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray My friend the poet, Matthew Sweeney, is certain he is dying. This is a conviction he has held without remission, since 1952 when he first saw the light, in its grey Irish version, in Ballyliffin, in northernmost Donegal. He knew even then, though he was some years from the ...”

“... consolidated institutional model to the peripatetic tradition of the Hellenes. In contrast, J.O. Ward puts his erudition to dubious use, ranting in great detail about the implausibility of the fictional medieval library at the heart of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. In doing so, he leaves unanswered a number of intriguing questions about the library ...”

“... view of the Tonsons as patrons doesn’t tell quite the whole story. Perhaps the Tory libeller Ned Ward gets it right in calling Tonson ‘an Amphibeous Mortal, Chief Merchant to the Muses’: a man successfully inhabiting quite separate spheres, deftly mediating between Mammon and Parnassus, always with an eye to the main chance. That’s what Tonson saw in ...”

“... for his extraordinarily wide reach.To take an obvious example, Renan is everywhere in the work of Matthew Arnold, arguably his nearest British homologue. Arnold quickly recognised the kinship when Renan’s Essais appeared, confiding to one correspondent before the end of 1859 that ‘with respect both to morality and intelligence I think we are singularly at ...”

“... a better person’, though that may be the last thing anyone should ask of a novel. The narrator, Matthew Homes, is 19 years old. He lives in Bristol. When he was nine, his older brother, Simon, who had Down’s syndrome, died during a family holiday at a caravan park on the Dorset coast. The exact circumstances of his death aren’t revealed until ...”

“... factory (‘people like you’). In 2019, the Ukip biographer turned right-populist advocate Matthew Goodwin identified the Brexit Party’s core vote in the European elections as the self-employed, aspirational plumbers, electricians and factory workers. But the BNP vote was not confined to those sectors, any more than the Brexit vote was dominated by ...”

“... was, I suspect, someone mentioned only parenthetically here: Aldous’s aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward.Aldous’s mother, Julia, was among the first generation of girls able to compete for the benefits of higher education. After attending Oxford High School she was a home student at Somerville. In 1882, she got a first-class degree in English, the first of ...”

“... only to consume the web, and didn’t give up. Metafilter.com was set up in 1999 by the programmer Matthew Haughey, as a place where people could put links to the good stuff they found on the web. He describes it as a special kind of group weblog that ‘exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster ...”

“... a life-saving blood transfusion on the grounds that it was contrary to his faith. Mr Justice Ward, as he was then, gave the hospital leave to treat E against his will, declaring that the courts ‘should be very slow to allow an infant to martyr himself’. Where a child has sufficient intelligence and understanding to comprehend their medical ...”