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“... Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy and Björk, but Plat du Jour is a different kettle of fish, a personal project that has taken a couple of years to devise and record ...”

“... Matthew Arnold worried that a literary reputation in England, unconfirmed by ‘the whole group of civilised nations’ (by which he meant Europe), might be merely provincial. At the same time he was pretty confident about which poets Europe ought, in due course, to favour. Wordsworth was admired at home but not abroad; and since Arnold was sure Wordsworth as a poet in English ranked second only to Shakespeare and Milton, and that among European poets of the 18th and 19th centuries only Goethe was superior, he anticipated a European recognition of Wordsworth which has never come ...”

“... Foundations, George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles, Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism, Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind, William Camden’s Remains, Newton’s Optics and works by Sir Kenelm Digby. Johnson drew on hundreds of other writers. To illustrate his reading, and use of quotations, consider the case of George ...”

“... essays and poems edited by Robert Crawford. It is also the tenor of many of the pieces in it. As Matthew Wickman puts it, in one of those weaselish generalities that suggest a lurking self-doubt, ‘most scholars believe his most significant poetic achievements are in Scots.’ In fact, the 1773 Poems begins with ‘Poems on Various Subjects’, 28 of ...”

“... piss smells so good I think about bottling it’; ‘We’re obsessed.’ If Laurie Taylor and Matthew Taylor, father and son, had read Rachel Cusk and Ian Sansom, they might not be so vexed by the question they pose in their title. A pop-sociological essay with autobiographical digressions, What Are Children For? is an odd book in a number of ways, the ...”

“... In 1967, Herbert Marcuse published a little essay entitled ‘The End of Utopia’, which now reads like a document of a long lost civilisation. Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that ‘there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production ...”

“... serve to enfranchise these strange children pitiless in their ignorance and contempt? Like Matthew Arnold telling the early Romantic poets that they did not know enough, he needles us with our callowness. Some of the poems in The Triumph of Love adopt voices other than Hill’s, but those that sound like him resemble the angriest poems in Canaan, in ...”

“... as a biographer, he turned to triumphant success in a radio play about a nervous young biographer, Herbert Reeve, engaged on just such a quest as he had himself abandoned. Reed’s hero (whose name owes something to that of Herbert Read, the poet and critic, with whom he was tired of being confused) assembles a mass of ...”

“... his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English humour’ too. He was too near academe to be a ...”

“... strategically and learn abstract concepts. ‘If one could devise a successful chess machine,’ Herbert Simon and others suggested in 1958, ‘one would seem to have penetrated to the core of the human intellectual endeavour.’ Combine this with its clear measures of success and readily formalised rules, and chess seemed to offer the perfect testbed for ...”

“... their titles suggest. (An outline of Dante’s life is provided separately in a short essay by Matthew Reynolds, Griffiths’s co-editor.) A reader will come away from Griffiths’s piece having heard a good deal about Dante’s works and the world from which they issued. But the manner of the introduction is so peculiar that its information is less ...”

“... made to smuggle some sense of direction or progress back into this account – the ambiguity of Herbert Spencer’s coinage ‘the survival of the fittest’ allowed many to see it as a constant process of improvement – but the strict logic of Darwin’s mechanism didn’t warrant any such comforting inference: chance dictated the appearance of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetry is the lyric.’Giving a useful biographical sketch of Palgrave (an Oxford pal of Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, and an admirer of Tennyson), Bucknell relates his professional work in English adult education to a growing passion for ‘England’s native literature … English history and the values of the English people’. After ...”

“... pact between the Tories and the Lloyd George Liberals, now semi-detached from the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the ...”