Stefan Collini

Reading may not make the world go round but it can make it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a...

His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers.

“We have now entered the world of hotel and restaurant guides: some departments will have signs next to the entrance saying ‘HEFCE-commended’, while prospective students will decide whether they will be content with ‘plain regional teaching’ (one mortarboard), or would prefer ‘high-quality teaching in its category’ (two mortarboards), or perhaps even stretch to ‘exceptional teaching of international quality’ (three mortarboards). Suicides among heads of department who are stripped of one of the coveted mortarboards cannot be ruled out.”

When Stephen Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been...