Search Results

Advanced Search

151 to 165 of 189 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Ghosts

Hugh Haughton, 5 December 1985

The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate.
Macmillan, 604 pp., £30, April 1985, 0 333 29441 6
Show More
The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Vols I and II 
edited by Lennart Björk.
Macmillan, 428 pp., £35, May 1985, 0 333 36777 4
Show More
Emma Hardy’s Diaries 
edited by Richard Taylor.
Mid-Northumberland Arts Group/Carcanet, 216 pp., £14.95, January 1985, 0 904790 21 5
Show More
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. V: 1914-1919 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 357 pp., £22.50, May 1985, 0 19 812622 0
Show More
The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, Vol. III 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 390 pp., £32.50, June 1985, 0 19 812784 7
Show More
Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900 
by K.D.M. Snell.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £30, May 1985, 0 521 24548 6
Show More
Thomas Hardy 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 547 pp., £12.95, June 1984, 0 19 254177 3
Show More
Show More
... idiosyncrasies of the artist’s vision. They stress ‘provinciality of feeling’ against Arnold’s urbane ‘tone of the centre’, the beauty of association which makes a battered tankard more important than the finest Greek vase, and a worn threshold more interesting than mists and mountains. They celebrate individuality, irregularity, and optical ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
Show More
Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
Show More
Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
Show More
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
Show More
Show More
... and which emerges again in Robert Burton, Tennyson and the ‘eternal note of sadness’ that Matthew Arnold heard on Dover Beach. Albion is itself expressive of ‘one of the most significant and salient aspects of the English imagination’ – its reverence for the past. There is no hint of identity crisis here; no sign of the bewilderment ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
Show More
The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
Show More
Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
Show More
Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
Show More
Show More
... multiplicity may turn out to be a trickier sort of virtue than it might seem. ‘Browning,’ Matthew Arnold told his friend Clough, ‘is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness,’ apparently unwilling or unable to understand that one ‘must begin with an Idea of the ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
Show More
Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
Show More
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
Show More
Show More
... Morland and Benjamin Haydon as Dickens and George Eliot were superior in ambition to Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. In the case of caricature as well as fiction, the artist in the newer genre was doing something that the well-precedented talent in the dignified genre could never have conceived of. (Arnold’s put-down of ...

One Bit of Rock or Moor

Susan Eilenberg: Wordsworth and the Victorians, 3 September 1998

Wordsworth and the Victorians 
by Stephen Gill.
Oxford, 300 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 19 811965 8
Show More
The Five-Book Prelude 
by William Wordsworth, edited by Duncan Wu.
Blackwell, 214 pp., £40, April 1997, 0 631 20548 9
Show More
Show More
... and sentimental maidens in quasi-medieval settings. The texts of many of these editions (including Matthew Arnold’s) were surprising: they included poems appearing under newly concocted titles, selections ingeniously fashioned from distinct versions, and promiscuous arrangements that not even Wordsworth had attempted. This ‘textual anarchy’, as Gill ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It’s not so much that he said anything ...

Citizens

Christopher Ricks, 19 November 1981

Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 
by Marilyn Butler.
Oxford, 213 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 19 219144 6
Show More
Show More
... this book is among other things a manifesting of the function of criticism at the present time. Matthew Arnold’s supreme essay is everywhere relevant to the enterprise, not least because his are the reservations about Romanticism which have proved the most enduringly intelligent. Dr Butler would agree with him that ‘for the creation of a ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
Show More
Show More
... reverence for the poets of the past, suddenly forgot that he did, and began, ‘So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl,’ and went on: ‘But all the time he was talking she had in mind/The notion of what his whiskers would feel like/On the back of her neck.’ He could recite large sections of ‘Lycidas’, adding a commentary in the voice of ...

Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
Show More
Show More
... took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic engagement. (The big difference is that the great and good of Breslau in the 19th and early 20th centuries ...

Studied Luxury

Margaret Anne Doody, 20 April 1995

No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton 
by Shari Benstock.
Hamish Hamilton, 546 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 241 13298 3
Show More
Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life 
by Eleanor Dwight.
Harry Adams, 335 pp., $39.95, May 1994, 0 8109 3971 1
Show More
Show More
... was highly successful, both critically and commercially. Benstock takes her title from a snatch of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Resignation’ copied by Wharton into her Commonplace Book in 1908: ‘They believe me, who await/No gifts from chance have conquered fate’. What Arnold is celebrating is that markedly Victorian ...

Diary

Christopher Nicholson: Rare Birds, 22 November 2018

... to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold loosely divided English society into three classes, the Philistines (the middle classes), the Populace (the working ...

Was Ma Hump to blame?

John Sutherland: Aldous Huxley, 11 July 2002

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 496 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 316 85492 1
Show More
The Cat's Meow 
directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
April 2002
Show More
Show More
... having formed young Aldous’s personality: the premature death of his mother, Julia Huxley (née Arnold), when he was 14; his temporary blindness three years later; and – most damaging – the suicide of his older brother, Trevenen, who hanged himself when Aldous was 20. These traumas resurface, symptomatically, everywhere in his fiction. Julia’s ...

Differences

Frank Kermode, 22 October 1992

The Jew’s Body 
by Sander Gilman.
Routledge, 303 pp., £10.99, September 1992, 0 415 90459 5
Show More
Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend 
by John Gross.
Chatto, 355 pp., £18, September 1992, 0 7011 3523 9
Show More
Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading 
by Alan Sinfield.
Oxford, 365 pp., £27.50, September 1992, 0 19 811983 6
Show More
Show More
... Gilman traces this myth back to the Gospels, attaching dubious importance to the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates ...

Big Pod

Richard Poirier: How Podhoretz Dumped His Friends, 2 September 1999

Ex-Friends 
by Norman Podhoretz.
Free Press, 256 pp., $25, February 1999, 0 684 85594 1
Show More
Show More
... by Leavis to review The Liberal Imagination, he set out to show that Trilling was America’s Matthew Arnold. All the same, he became convinced that literary criticism would never again be thought of as the great synoptic subject, and that no one in the future would achieve the fame and centrality granted to Trilling in America and Leavis in ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences