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“... 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 ...”

“... elevated level than was expected of high art. He avoided ideal beauty. Commissioned to paint St Matthew composing his Gospel, Caravaggio depicted him as an illiterate, stupefied by the Hebrew letters which his clumsy hand, held by the angel, traces. For another altarpiece he painted a handsome but not a divinely beautiful young woman standing in a doorway ...”

“... was what the vulgar nine-tenths of the population got up to, that silent majority which Matthew Arnold dubbed the philistines; Arnold’s articulate minority, the intellectuals, were supposed to live for culture and high seriousness. Byron’s approach to literature is as embarrassing in the 20th century as it was in the 19th because it is ...”

“... The last few decades have been good for Matthew Arnold. In 1977, R.H. Super completed the 11-volume Complete Prose Works, a venture that seemed quixotic (‘all those school reports!’) when he began it in 1960. The complete Poems, edited, tidied up and annotated by Kenneth and Miriam Allott, were revised and reissued in 1979 ...”

“... When Raphael Samuel died, the second volume of his projected trilogy Theatres of Memory was left unfinished. Some of the longer essays it was intended to contain were unwritten or unannotated or barely begun. The list of contents was still provisional, and the editors have assembled this book mainly by reconstructing Samuel’s shifting intentions, partly by guessing at them ...”

“... study sculpture, and the short step from drawing it to making it was irresistible. When the young Raphael arrived in Florence in 1504 – and he went there ‘to study’ – he paid as much attention to the sculpture of Donatello and Michelangelo as to the paintings by Leonardo and Fra Bartolommeo. By the time Raphael had ...”

“... in letters, puts alongside one another the reports of the splenetic but good-hearted hypochondriac Matthew Bramble, seeing wherever he looks in Georgian London the flotsam of ‘a tide of luxury’, and of his niece Lydia Melford, a frothy but virtuous ingénue who discovers, instead, ‘wealth and grandeur’ comparable only to ‘the Arabian Night’s ...”

“... faces and bodies selectively. His most powerful and coherent compositions – the Calling of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel in S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, for example – use light to dramatise essentials. In that picture it streams past Christ to highlight the faces of the saint and his companions who are gathered round a table.Bodies overlap. The ...”

“... his intelligence was preeminently a historicising one, and it is perhaps symptomatic of this that Matthew, the fictional self he created in his trilogy, is a university lecturer ‘working on population movements into the Welsh mining valleys in the middle decades of the 19th century’. Whereas the ‘close reading’ of a limited number of texts was the ...”

“... progressed, followed similar lines, with a newly-militant Nonconformity rampant in the North (Matthew Arnold takes up arms against it in Culture and Anarchy), while Anglicanism cultivated the Barsetshire parishes. Politically, as students of electoral geography have shown, the North-South divide was almost as apparent in Mid-Victorian times as it was to ...”

“... not a fair copy, survives in the Princeton University Library (and in a 1973 facsimile, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli). According to James West, editor of Trimalchio, the typescript of 27 October constitutes a completed version: ‘Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 ...”

“... the evening sky. A dream was the natural medium of Venetian imagining. A print entitled A Dream of Raphael (apparently because the engraver later worked for him) is the opposite of rational Classicism. Baby monsters out of Bosch, just such monsters as infest Giorgione’s Sunset Landscape in the National Gallery, crawl from a canal into a catastrophic ...”

“... writing this diary, the channel is showing an episode of the American problems-show Sally Jessy Raphael about reckless teenagers. Jenny is 14 and is telling the audience to shut the fuck up. ‘Do you think you are someone who does the right thing in this world?’ asks Sally Jessy, the flame-haired talk-show host who spent her teenage years in ...”

“... in different films, captioned ‘Mario drunk. From Bacchus, 1596’; ‘Mario the tough. From Matthew Called, 1599’; ‘Cecco adolescent. From John in the Wild II, 1602’; ‘Cecco under the knife. From Isaac II, 1603’ and so on. Although our awareness of Caravaggio’s models and props has been increased by the monographic loan exhibition and the ...”

“... the Holocaust. The idea was still in his mind when the screenwriter of Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael, wondered whether Schindler’s List might have satisfied that need. Raphael reports the exchange that followed:S.K.: Think that was about the Holocaust?F.R.: Wasn’t it? What else was it about?S.K.: That was about ...”