Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose

Jan 17, 2026 2:04 AM

Author:Matthew Arnold,P. Keating

'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class'

Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in 'bondage to machinery' and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the 'sweetness and light' of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think.

Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.

Reviews

It is the triumph of this novel that Doyle - entirely without condescension - shows the inner life of this battered housewife to be the same stuff as that of the heroes of the great novels of Europe

—— Mary Gordon , New York Times Book Review

In feeling the pulse of a raw Dublin suburb, Doyle is recording a beat that can be recognised all over the world

—— The Times

This new novel is Roddy Doyle's best to date. I cannot recall any writer who has better captured the vulnerability and courage of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage

—— Cork Examiner

Even more mesmerizing than his prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

—— Daily Mail

Impassioned, dignified and richly humane

—— Independent

His best work yet

—— The Times

Compulsively readable

—— Financial Times

Roddy Doyle's unsparing examination of a brutal marriage transcends the boundaries of class and nationhood

—— The Times

Paula Spencer may be Doyle's most successful literary creation yet, a tour de force of literary ventriloquism that gives the lie to the old writing workshop canard that a man can't write from the point of view of a woman, let alone in her voice

—— Washington Post

A complex and intricate portrait of an unlikely, yet likable, heroine

—— Calum Macdonald , The Herald

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