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“... Benjamin’s anti-historicism might be ‘quite literally the warrant of our survival’. It was Matthew Arnold who wrote that currency and supremacy were assured to good literature by the ‘instinct of self-preservation in humanity’; I.A. Richards had echoed him in describing poetry as being ‘capable of saving us’. Eagleton’s new book ends on ...”

“... and where better to rest than in the company of cool, humouring, compassionate observers like Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, or of Lionel Trilling himself? Naturally if you write as if present and past were one, you tend to write about purely notional things and people; like Matthew Arnold, you attach your ...”

“... to the life around him, were close in spirit to those of the subject of his first book – Matthew Arnold. An American Arnold: for it is to American culture that Trilling addresses himself – often more specifically than we are apt to suppose. It is a tribute to his breadth and persuasiveness that the present ...”

“... Henry Hallam, ‘And keep our present self to watch within!’ In his Preface to his Poems of 1853 Matthew Arnold famously located the beginning of modernity in ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. Though Armstrong does not wish to restrict her focus to the dramatic monologue, Tennyson’s and Browning’s familiar experiments provide the clearest ...”

“... He is beaten by Jay, who had the sense to play safe ‘with a series of sonnets in the manner of Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth and Keats’. At Oxford, he loudly proclaims his intention of competing for the Chancellor’s English Essay prize, only to forget all about it. As a new backbencher in the House of Commons, he ‘recklessly’ moves a critical ...”

“... entered both the world of letters and the world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or ...”

“... him of lacking imagination, and went so far as to doubt whether his works should be called poetry. Matthew Arnold took this line further, dismissing Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’. Attacks on Pope’s morals also continued in the 19th century: C.W. Dilke was shocked to discover that Pope had ‘cooked’ a few letters in his published ...”

“... citizens and wiser persons, for which it is eminently unsuited. It has paid too much attention to Matthew Arnold, ‘the source and sustenance of a still prevailing humanistic thrust in Anglo-American criticism’. Arnold is reproved for having recommended culture as the help out of present difficulties, and as a ...”

“... after all.’ But the motif survives that irony. Raine finds it most seriously in Henry James and Matthew Arnold; in James in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Private Life’, Washington Square and other fictions of the unlived life; in Arnold in his poem ‘The Buried Life’: And we have been on many thousand ...”

“... and “Culture” ’, which is a Quixotic, Little Englander defence of the values of Matthew Arnold against imaginary attacks by hordes of social scientist windmills, does not seem to connect up at all. So by what standards should the outcome be judged? Those of amateur or professional? And what sort of professional? The first chapter ...”

“... of herself. A great deal, however, was required of Arthur, the anxiously conscientious pupil of Dr Arnold, and he was haunted by the dreadful prospect of falling short. Annie couldn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, but set about remaking the world for the women who came after her. It was assumed that her talented brother would conquer the world as it had already ...”

“... had embarked was perhaps more central to Victorian high culture (the culture that produced Jowett, Matthew Arnold and Housman) than the Oxford English Dictionary itself. There was humour in Liddell and Scott, or so we were told, but it was donnish to the point of desiccation. The entry explaining how σῡκοφάντης, literally ‘fig-sayer’, came ...”

“... but fans were still dropping their visiting cards through the grating. Another literary admirer, Matthew Arnold, mourned her as a symbol of the conflicting forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. ‘Greek-soul’d’ and ‘Trick’d out with a Parisian speech and face’, the dying classical actress had had the Hebrew rites administered at her bedside: In ...”

“... being levelled at ‘the fiend aristocracy’ and ‘Old Corruption’. When we read Cobden or Matthew Arnold, by whose time the terminology of ‘class’ is beginning to settle down, we are or should be continually amazed at the brilliant and devious manoeuvres they play with ‘class’ terms, especially ‘middle class’. Having, in Culture and ...”

“... nature’ by means of reading and the study of art and the natural world, he was much closer to Matthew Arnold and Ruskin than legions of Arnoldians and Ruskinians have dared to allow. Smiles was not the killjoy evangelical that Arnold and Ruskin had in mind as their ideal-typical adversary: it’s possible to trace ...”