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“... for the murder weapon (‘As this catalogue goes to press, the .40 ESP has testfired over 37,000 Smith & Wesson rounds without malfunction’), the central character’s hospital records and a tabloid report of the crime make their way into the early pages of the novel. The reader is expected to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. deadkidsongs ...”

“... and of moral improvement, as well as by the partisans of ‘culture’ who rallied behind Matthew Arnold. Her account of the debate about the function of the Royal Academy reveals the early skirmishes in the unending combat between market forces and artistic high-mindedness. But, having opened, the view quickly closes again. The wider perspective ...”

“... is something wrong with a world in which one meets Mrs Lowinsky and Roger Hinks and Mrs Royde-Smith. They smell of middlebrow.’ The Journal will record sayings without comment and with delectation; to be worthy of record, an exchange should crushingly compact several reputations into the smallest space. ‘Logan [Pearsall ...”

“... in the mid-Atlantic: lurid with suicide, Victorian capitalism got a very bad press. In 1776 Adam Smith had argued in The Wealth of Nations that free-market capitalism was a force for material and moral progress. Capitalism left to itself, he insisted, must produce the best of all possible worlds, since a capitalist pursuing self-interest makes life better ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and policy tensions within a party that was itself a coalition of Liberals and Social Democrats. Matthew D’Ancona’s In It Together is typical of current media obsessions. A lively book, with many neat turns of phrase, and informed by reliable political antennae, it is a gossipy insider’s account of the current government which focuses largely on ...”

“... As much fun as drinking, as they like to say, but without the hangover and all for a dollar. Matthew J. Raphael (a coy pseudonym used to protect his alcoholic’s anonymity) investigates the life and personality of the flakier of the two men who created AA in 1935. Robert Smith (‘Dr Bob’) was a proctologist, stolid ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the Quran appeared. Its Royalist translator had intended to dedicate the book to the king, as Matthew Dimmock noted in Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture; after the regicide, he added a preface in which he used the figure of a bloodthirsty, power-hungry Muhammad to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the ...”

“... that suit his story, stronger still in his selective cast of political economists, led by Adam Smith and Keynes, and backed up by other big guns – Burke and Mill, above all – who appear here as adversaries of Mammon, signalling from a buried past that we can still weigh the need for benign public outcomes against the private wish to accumulate, own and ...”

“... catalogued, every song analysed. (For an example of the hyperbole Sonic Youth can attract, see Matthew Stearns’s book on Daydream Nation, the album with the Richter candle on the cover,2 for the 33 1/3 series: ‘Certain records arrive like howling bullets at crux moments and split the face of music wide open, exposing long-concealed sonic ...”

“... her ‘civilised reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by ...”

“... the sense of presence – is foremost in his sights. Obrist reports an epiphanic conversation with Matthew Barney in January 2000 about ‘a new hunger among artists for live experience’, and like his curatorial colleagues in ‘relational aesthetics’, Nicolas Bourriaud, head of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Daniel Birnbaum, director of the ...”

“... England and America, and productive of a great deal of latterday ‘chatter about Harriet’, as Matthew Arnold had called it in deploring Shelley and his circle. What a set they had been, he said, and what a set was involved in the New Apocalypse, the wartime couplings of Fitzrovia and Poetry London. ‘Talent’ and the behaviour that went with it was ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”