[3] After a year spent teaching in a girls' finishing school in Switzerland, Matthew worked as a copywriter in various London advertising agencies including JWT, before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.

His books include Diary of a Somebody, Loosely Engaged, The Long-Haired Boy (adapted for TV as A Perfect Hero, starring Nigel Havers), an annotated edition with Benny Green of Three Men in a Boat, The Junket Man, How to Survive Middle Age, Family Matters, The Amber Room,[4] A Nightingale Sang in Fernhurst Road, Now We Are Sixty,[5] Knocking On, Now We Are Sixty (and a Bit), Summoned by Balls, When We Were Fifty, The Man Who Dropped the Le Creuset on His Toe and Other Bourgeois Mishaps, and Dog Treats: An Assortment of Mutts, Mongrels, Puppies and Pooches.

As a journalist, he has been a travel writer for The Sunday Times, a restaurant critic for Vogue, a property correspondent for Punch, and a television and book reviewer for the Daily Mail.

[7] He has appeared many times over the years on BBC Radio 4 – among other things as chairman of The Travelling Show, presenter of Something to Declare, Points of Departure and Plain Tales from the Rhododendrons, and panellist on Quote Unquote.

[9] In 2012 he recorded a special Freedom Pass episode with Terry Waite,[10] and in 2013 he and Martin Jarvis journeyed back to their childhood homes in Grey Shorts and Sandals.