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“... desire to react to hooliganism by erecting unforgiving steel cages which became coffins’, Colin Ward writes in All Quiet on the Hooligan Front (1996). Lord Justice Taylor produced his interim report on the tragedy on 1 August that year. The chief superintendent in charge, Taylor decided, ‘could not face the enormity of the decision to open the gates and ...”

“... a doctor who is ‘about to smirk’ when walking in on a couple having sex in the hospital ward is arrested by the patient’s baleful stare – ‘Sonny Liston could give such a look’; a recently enlisted marine regrets his decision to join up when he meets boot-camp disciplinarians ‘most of whom looked like close relatives of Charles ...”

“... fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he even borrows the term ‘art lite’. But most of the time he seems to like the art and the artists, for the same reasons that Stallabrass detests ...”

“... philosophise in their works, but also the Victorian ‘slice of life’ theory still admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or ...”

“... jurisdiction. The reign’s biggest disaster – one which, according to the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris, caused a crisis in belief throughout Christendom – was Louis’s capture by the Egyptian sultan in 1250; and there may have been a Spanish element to that too, since Louis’s underestimation of Muslim power may have been encouraged by the recent ...”

“... This in turn reminded us that Benchley’s book contains a strangely Ballardian sequence in which Matthew Hooper, the marine biologist, and Ellen Brody, the police chief’s neglected wife, embark over lunch on a shared sexual fantasy that envisages them, distracted by mutual masturbation, crashing their car and dying on the freeway with their genitals ...”

“... making it impossible for him to declare his Anglican beliefs as the job required. Like his friend Matthew Arnold, Clough was rescued by the rapid professionalisation of education. It offered what his increasingly accomplished and innovative poetry could not: a gentleman’s occupation, and the salary he needed in order to marry. But his post in the Education ...”

“... thrills – or because of them – several of Frost’s letters appear to be written in order to ward something off. ‘I have nearly written myself tired for tonight,’ he ends one letter. ‘Write often and keep my courage up.’ A few months later, he confesses: ‘I’m too tired to be awake writing.’ The night fears he suffered as a child continued ...”

“... water out of Cornish silver mines. Sen blames Watt and his business partner, the factory-owner Matthew Boulton, for causing a thirty-year hiatus by manipulating the patent system to ward off competitors, but engines produced power and generated money long before scientific laws and equations were developed to explain how ...”

“... for seditious libel or scandalum magnatum (defamation of a peer, judge or other dignitary), or to ward off private vengeance: the ‘Rose Alley Ambuscade’ of 1679 saw Dryden beaten up in retribution for a satire he didn’t even write. Sometimes historical proxies or punning nicknames could stand in. Wolsey, Sejanus and ‘Robin’ were all used to ...”

“... churchmen in the select Metaphysical Society and engaged in high-profile exchanges with his friend Matthew Arnold about the respective claims of science and literature in education. When a magisterial statement was needed on ethics and evolution, it was the ageing Huxley who provided it in his Romanes Lecture for 1893. The celebrity Darwinian of the 1860s ...”

“... from getting worse. To complete the cast of characters, and to promote continuity, we have Colonel Matthew Maddox, an honourable Englishman and the subject of an assassination attempt in book one, The Killing of Yesterday’ s Children, winkled out of Berkshire by a brigadier who tells him that his country needs him – needs him, in fact, to liaise with the ...”

“... revolution of 1258: ‘When the king agreed to accept their counsel he did not make himself their ward, nor did he agree that they should give orders.’ Can Henry’s desire to make war on France in the late 1220s be interpreted, like Richard’s in the 1380s, as a desire to assert his manhood? And once Henry, unlike Fletcher’s Richard, realised that he ...”

“... or overlooked it. But the consequence of this overreaching is guilt, fear of reprisal and – to ward this off – an equally savage and gleeful redoubling of disgust and anger upon the self. So it is no surprise that Roger should characterise himself as a bad man: for example, here, in a portrait of the evil, paranoid voyeur. Secret glimpses ... of life ...”

“... war veterans. Always averse to the psychoanalytical view of the world as one vast psychiatric ward, he argued that these men were not pathological cases, ‘shell-shocked’ or ‘psychoneurotic’. They had experienced dramatic disruptions, loss of everything familiar, all ‘sense of personal sameness and historical continuity’, and had plummeted into ...”