Books by A C Benson

Arthur Christopher Benson, FRSL (24 April 1862 - 17 June 1925) was an English essayist, poet, author and academic and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is noted for having written the words of the song "Land of Hope and Glory". From 1885 to 1903 he taught at Eton, but returned to Cambridge in 1904 as a Fellow of Magdalene College to lecture in English Literature. He became president of the college (the Master's deputy) in 1912, and he was Master of Magdalene (head of the college) from December 1915 until his death in 1925. From 1906, he was a governor of Gresham's School.

"The secret of failure was that the great forces which move mankind were out of touch with each other, and furnished no mutual support. Art had no vital relation with industry; work was dissociated from joy; political economy was at issue with humanity; science was at daggers drawn with religion; action did not correspond to thought, being to seeming; and finally the individual was conceived as having claims and interests at variance with the claims and interests of the society of which he formed a part, in fact as standing out against it, in an opposition so sharply marked that one of the greatest thinkers could write a book with the title "Man versus the State.""