Stefan Collini

Stefan Collini is the author of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, What Are Universities For? and The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism. His edition of Orwell’s Selected Essays was published in 2021. He is an emeritus professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge.

Letter

Daunting

1 December 2022

I can well understand why Sharon Footerman was puzzled by my assertion that in 1960 Oxford and Cambridge ‘abandoned Latin as an entrance requirement’ (Letters, 5 January). Nonetheless, both universities did, after much controversy, take this decision in May 1960. The key word is ‘requirement’: until 1960 no student could matriculate at Oxford without a qualification in Latin; after 1960...
Letter

Snakes and Ladders

1 April 2021

Stefan Collini writes: I agree with Lawrence Denholm’s account of the legal position of academies, but the phrase which he, quite understandably, challenges on these grounds was an (overly condensed) attempt to capture the reality of their activities. As with many of the colleges and universities that have sprung up in recent years, the category of ‘not for profit’ proves, on closer inspection,...
Letter

What Matters

27 January 2020

There is a bizarre surplus of outrage in Alexander Zevin’s letter (Letters, 20 February). Even leaving aside (as I shall) his unnecessary and misleading ad hominem remarks, there are too many exaggerations and misrepresentations in it. Surely the nub of the matter is this: Zevin’s book Liberalism at Large is described as ‘a critical biography’ of the Economist since 1843; Zevin views the...
Letter

Sold Out

23 October 2013

Anne Summers complains that, in discussing Everything for Sale?, I gave details of the career of Roger Brown but not of Helen Carasso, ‘with whom he wrote the book’ (Letters, 21 November). Her reproach is misplaced. I was merely following the indications in the book itself, where the acknowledgments, signed by Roger Brown alone, state that ‘as author I take full and final responsibility for Everything...
Letter

Sorts of Success

5 August 2010

Mark Etherton complains that although I referred to Graham Greene’s stint as literary editor of the short-lived magazine Night and Day, I failed to mention that he was the cause of the magazine’s failure (Letters, 19 August). The reason I didn’t is that it does not seem to be true. In Shades of Greene, Jeremy Lewis writes: ‘It is generally assumed that Night and Day was closed down after MGM...

The Terrifying Vrooom: Empsonising

Colin Burrow, 15 July 2021

Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the...

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George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to...

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Athenian View

Michael Brock, 12 March 1992

In seven of the nine chapters in this fine book Dr Collini depicts the denizens of the Athenaeum in its great days. T.H. Huxley, having left his umbrella at Matthew Arnold’s, asks his...

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Burrinchini’s Spectre

Peter Clarke, 19 January 1984

Time was when Clio had a seamless garment: but that was before the division of labour set in. Prefixless history is now condescendingly thought of as ‘straight’ history and her...

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