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Memories of New Zealand

Peter Campbell, 1 December 2011

... Ian became a professor of law at Victoria University, a rather fierce but much respected teacher. Arnold, my father, went from teaching at school and university to the NZCER and then the civil service, first as an inspector. He said that he wished he had been named not after Arnold of Rugby, but after ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... from biography, Heffer’s favourite source is the contemporary novel. Again and again he mines Arnold Bennett, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found ...

Saint John Henry

Richard Altick, 5 August 1982

John Henry Newman: His Life and Work 
by Brian Martin.
Chatto, 160 pp., £8.95, May 1982, 0 7011 2588 8
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Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England 
by Walter Arnstein.
Missouri, 271 pp., £14, June 1982, 9780826203540
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... an Irishman bearing the exquisitely un-Protestant name of Murphy, which enliven the pages of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: but both belong to the same record of continual religious controversy in 19th-century England. (It was intramural contention, however, not the larger one between Protestant and Catholic, which ignited one of the most ...

The One-Eyed World of Germaine Greer

Brigid Brophy, 22 November 1979

The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work 
by Germaine Greer.
Secker, 373 pp., £12.50, November 1979, 1 86064 677 8
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... So far as I remember, it was the cosmopolitan Somerset Maugham who remarked that francophile Arnold Bennett thought that the French were the only foreigners who breakfasted on rolls and coffee. Ms Greer’s one-eyed view of art history has the same disadvantage. If you had nothing to go on except her chronicle of women painters whose works were later ...

Fit and Few

Donald Davie, 3 May 1984

The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 30632 5
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... 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 ...
Possible Dreams: A Personal History of the British Christian Socialists 
by Chris Bryant.
Hodder, 351 pp., £25, July 1996, 0 340 64201 7
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... movement. It has certainly never provided Christian socialism with mass appeal. The Guild of St Matthew, which was founded by Stewart Headlam in 1877, and by 1884, according to Bryant, was the first explicitly socialist organisation in Britain, had at most a membership of 360. Its stated aim was to fight secularist prejudice, to defend the Church of England ...
George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Memoir 
by Mary Moorman.
Hamish Hamilton, 253 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 241 10358 4
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Public and Private 
by Humphrey Trevelyan.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 241 10357 6
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... the great social historian who had made Carlyle and Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like love or it is nothing.’ He fused England, poetry, joy, youth and landscape in a single sacramental experience. If this is rather like ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... he moved back and forth from being worldly to being world-weary. In the summer of 1881 he wrote to Matthew Arnold: ‘I have only now, too late perhaps, found out how all art requires solitude as its companion, only now indeed know the splendid difficulty of this great art in which you are a master illustrious and supreme.’ He enclosed his first book of ...

Where does culture come from?

Terry Eagleton, 25 April 2024

... Culture, in the sense of the refined and civilised, was needed to buy off the other half of Matthew Arnold’s title, anarchy. Unless liberal values were disseminated to the masses, the masses might end up sabotaging liberal culture. Religion had traditionally bred a sense of duty, deference, altruism and spiritual edification in the common ...

Appelfeld 1990

Christopher Ricks, 8 February 1990

... remember Ruskin’s murmur: ‘I am afraid Wordsworth was often affected in his simplicity.’ Or Matthew Arnold’s insistence that what in Wordsworth is true simplicity can become in Tennyson the affected thing, simplesse:French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this semblance (often very beautiful ...

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

... on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled borrowings from the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew and Jeremiah. He concluded that for those with ears to hear a biblical subtext, ‘America’s adversaries had been redefined as enemies of God and current events had been constituted as confirmation of scripture’ . . . Occasional presidential use of ...

Good History

Christopher Hill, 5 March 1981

After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter 
edited by Barbara Malament.
Manchester, 363 pp., £17.95, December 1980, 0 7190 0805 0
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Puritans and Adventurers 
by T.H. Breen.
Oxford, 270 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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On History 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sarah Matthews.
Weidenfeld, 226 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 297 77880 3
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Sociology and History 
by Peter Burke.
Allen and Unwin, 116 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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... one will not study Locke but Defoe.’ I would like to believe that. Pocock isolates the royalist Matthew Wren as the most systematic exponent of ‘possessive individualism’. The main object of throwing out these sparkling ideas is to annoy the orthodox: Pocock wastes no time on asking why ‘a possessive-individualist view of society was promoted by ...

Spaced

Michael Neve, 3 September 1981

The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey 
by Grevel Lindop.
Dent, 433 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 460 04358 7
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... is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits, in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.’ He felt obliged – an obligation which was part of the pretention of his epoch – to call such insights ‘evidence of the law of antagonism’. But they are shrewd, for all ...

From Plato to Nato

Christopher Norris, 7 July 1983

Literary Theory: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 244 pp., £15, May 1983, 0 631 13258 9
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Essays on Fiction 1971-82 
by Frank Kermode.
Routledge, 227 pp., £9.95, May 1983, 0 7100 9442 6
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Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction 
by Vincent Leitch.
Hutchinson, 290 pp., £15, January 1983, 0 09 150690 5
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Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies 
by Peter Wollen.
Verso, 228 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 86091 055 5
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Knowing the Poor: A Case-Study in Textual Reality Construction 
by Bryan Green.
Routledge, 221 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 7100 9282 2
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... tradition. The Report is an odd mixture of high-minded argument and transparent political motives. Matthew Arnold’s rebuke to the complacent philistines of his day has by now – in the wake of 1917 – taken on a more urgent toning. Deny the working classes their share of the nation’s spiritual heritage, and they are likely to forget all about the ...

Introversion Has Its Limits

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Essayism’, 8 March 2018

Essayism 
by Brian Dillon.
Fitzcarraldo, 138 pp., £10.99, June 2017, 978 1 910695 41 8
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Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found 
by Bella Bathurst.
Wellcome, 224 pp., £8.99, February 2018, 978 1 78125 776 0
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Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-Four Attempts 
by Brian Blanchfield.
Picador, 181 pp., £9.99, August 2017, 978 1 5098 4785 3
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... since eaten many things in respectable restaurants with far more trepidation.Only from reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History did he learn that the eating of clay was a prehistoric habit, something that kept the stomach filled until the next kill of aurochs. When he met Toynbee, he mentioned his own experience of this primitive practice. Toynbee ...

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