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“... Eliot derived his poetics from the French Symbolists, so that it was impossible for him to follow Matthew Arnold in finding a solution to spiritual turbulence in poetry as such. The language of poetry cannot deliver a solution of this kind, indeed cannot even comment authoritatively on such a condition, since to be persuasive – which is to say, for ...”

“... Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at breakfast, but Agnes Lewis had no doubts. In 1894 the rescued document created much excitement, not least because it seemed to show Joseph as the natural father of Jesus. Agnes tried to explain this away, but was not too embarrassed; like her sister, Maggie Gibson, she was enjoying ...”

“... should be so largely unknown to readers of strict literary interests. A general impression from Matthew Arnold will not do. The major verse of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the romances of Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (in English the Mabinogion) are evident classics in the writing of this island. Moreover the interest of several Welsh verse forms is considerable. Even ...”

“... the full Yale treatment. ‘Almost’, because Brooke is a more abstemious editor than W.S. Lewis and the team responsible for the Yale edition of Walpole’s Correspondence: indeed, he makes the specific assumption that ‘the student of these volumes will have [that edition] readily available.’ Student, not reader, mark you: and we are told also ...”

“... of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in white, or Lewis Carroll’s little girl lost in a looking-glass. Still more, she is the madwoman in the attic. But she is a madwoman who cares about accuracy, and is vexed by the slackness of other readers: It annoyed her that they thought she was mad, but it annoyed her ...”

“... British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of labour. Human culture ...”

“... years to have been encased behind a great mask, from which he would only occasionally peep out: Matthew Spender recalled ‘a direct, blue-eyed stare’ lasting two seconds, ‘then he’d pull back within his usual frontiers, as if he’d corroborated some long-held suspicion’. The change could be disturbing for old acquaintances. Margaret Gardiner, who ...”

“... of a poet’s preferred dramatis personae – Wordsworth’s beggars and village idiots, Matthew Arnold’s Carthusian monks and gypsies, the young Auden’s ‘airman’, Lionel Johnson’s and T.S. Eliot’s vanquished Kings – the investigation is seen to be fascinating and instructive. But already with Wordsworth and consistently thereafter the ...”

“... razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any longer. A lot of these commentaries appeared online, some of them only online, where they are now archived among the thousands of articles the Guardian has published on Corbyn or the leadership ...”

“... in which capacity – according to another character witness, the Evening Standard columnist Matthew D’Ancona – he had restored ‘public values’ damaged by the Labour government’s ‘culture of spin’. Exposed too were the failures of the original police investigation. It’s worth going back over this story. In 2006, Clive Goodman, the royal ...”

“... with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’ or ‘goonswaggle’ to make the mixture effervesce – often seems to be pushing out of view very nasty things that it doesn’t want fully to acknowledge. The way his tales for adults can underlie the ...”

“... the Latin genitives plural rosarum equorum dierum from the ablatives singular rosa equo die. Matthew Baerman examines case syncretism, the use of the same case-form for different cases. In Sanskrit, as he notes, the ablative is identical in the singular with the genitive except in a-stems (the counterpart of the Greek and Latin second declension); in the ...”

“... of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts should have contributed to a volume entitled ...”

“... ideas. One was to send his agents to break into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding, in Beverly Hills. They were hoping to find material they could use to blackmail Ellsberg into silence and perhaps also to embarrass Dr Fielding into testifying against his patient. However, the burglary of Dr Fielding’s office on 3 September ...”

“... an Aborigine, Arabanoo, initially as a native envoy and possibly also as a lover. Arabanoo (like Matthew Flinders’s tame Aborigine, Bungaree) is satirically decked out in an officer’s uniform and kept half-sozzled on brandy. When this innocent dies, just before the play comes off, the Governor loses all will to govern. (Phillip did actually sicken around ...”