Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "Culture’s Champion: On Rereading ‘Culture and Anarchy’." The Weekly Standard, September 2, 2016.

Excerpt:

It was by chance that my first reading of Culture and Anarchy with my students coincided with the centenary of its publication. But it was not by chance that I chose to read it then, in 1969, at the height of the culture war. Anticipating that war by more than a century, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote a passionate defense of culture—high culture, we would now say—against the prevailing low culture that he saw as tantamount to “anarchy.”

 

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