Arthur Benson ... was in the evening summer of his life. He wrote beautiful, at times too beautiful, prose. He published at least one book a year; readers who began could not put them down, though at the end of the book they had received nothing. He kept meditating on the highest ideals and professed weakness to do anything about those ideals. He observed naughtily, subtly, wittily, passively, on occasion with a feline caress.... His mind usually stayed at the level of gossip and anecdote but not always. His diary has been well edited: to read it is like looking into a large egg-shell full of bubbles. The undergraduates of Madgalene used to say about their Master that he spent the morning doing nothing and spent the afternoon writing about what he had done in the morning.

— Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life