Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British writer and journalist. Bennett is perhaps best known for non-fiction works such as How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and Mental Efficiency.

Books and Persons Being Comments On A Past Epoch 1908-1911

"A Great Man" from Arnold Bennett. English writer (1867-1931).

Excerpt from Anna of the Five Towns: A Novel
The yard was all silent and empty under the burning afternoon heat, which had made its asphalt springy like turf, when suddenly the children threw themselves out of the great doors at either end of the Sunday-school - boys from the right, girls from the left - in two howling, impetuous streams, that widened, eddied, intermingled, and formed backwaters until the whole quadrangle was full of clamour and movement. Many of the scholars carried prize-books bound in vivid tints, and proudly exhibited these volumes to their companions and to the...

" ...]topping the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it. The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures, where a horse or two cropped the short grass. At the railway bridge, which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the collection of shawds and stones lodged...

Excerpt from Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days
The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic - that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history - had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington. In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on the ground-floor and on the first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity can outwit nature's. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand...

Excerpt from Helen With the High Hand: An Idyllic Diversion
In the Five Towns human nature is reported to be so hard that you can break stones on it. Yet sometimes it softens, and then we have one of our rare idylls of which we are very proud, while pretending not to be. The soft and delicate South would possibly not esteem highly our idylls, as such. Nevertheless they are our idylls, idyllic for us, and reminding us, by certain symptoms, that though we never cry there is concealed somewhere within our bodies a fount of happy tears.
The town park is an idyll in the otherwise prosaic...

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett - How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1910), written by Arnold Bennett, is part of a larger work entitled How to Live. In this volume, he offers practical advice on how one might live (as opposed to just existing) within the confines of 24 hours a day. In the book, Bennett addressed the large and growing number of white-collar workers that had accumulated since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In his view, these workers put in eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, at jobs they did not enjoy, and at worst hated. They worked to make a...

"Denry the Audacious" from Arnold Bennett. English writer (1867-1931).

" ...]Yet possibly Hilda's terrific egoism might have got fresh books somehow from somewhere, had she really believed in the virtue of books. Thus far, however, books had not furnished her with what she wanted, and her faith in their promise was insecure. Books failing, might she not have escaped into some vocation? The sole vocation conceivable for her was that of teaching, and she knew, without having tried it, that she abhorred teaching. Further, there was no economical reason why she should work. In 1878, unless pushed by necessity, no girl might dream of a vocation: the idea was...