John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest poem in the English language, yet it seems to be fading slowly from public view. Who could write a new national epic?

He made reading, and writing, fun

The novel world of English literature in the 1700s

Henry Green had a strange and distinctive talent

On honesty as an attitude

Humanities catastrophists are just professionally insecure

We have to protect cultural history

Two hundred years after his birth, critic and poet Matthew Arnold still has much to teach conservatives

The great man’s peerless poetry is not the “soppy stuff” of cheap romanticism, but a harsh, unsparing — and often beautiful — look at the world

Speaking words of wisdom, LRB