The complete online text of Matthew Arnold by George William Erskine Russell.

IN HIS poem, "Rugby Chapel", Matthew Arnold remembered his father as "a mighty oak". His father, Thomas Arnold, immortalised in the novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and in Lytton Strachey's portrait in "Eminent Victorians", is probably the most famous English public-school headmaster. He was...

Perhaps the Reverend Dr Arnold, Head Master of Rugby School near Birmingham, would be a proper person. He is one of the most enlightened and liberal of our clergy.... John Stuart Mill, letter of 6 December 1831 (1) ON APRIL 5,...

ON CHESIL BEACHBy Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 208 pages, $22 As far as I can tell, there’s not a single weak sentence in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. O.K., it’s a very short novel and we’re cruising familiar territory—love gone wrong—but I still think...

For reasons I can’t explain, science fiction has always sent me to sleep. Perhaps it’s because I find living in the present scary enough. The pleasures of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic work—let alone H.G. Wells’—have passed me by. Even Truffaut’s film of Mr. Bradbury’s 1953 classic,...