Stefan Collini

In the early 20th century, literary pilgrims to Stratford-upon-Avon already knew a lot about the great writer they had come to honour. The author’s house in Church St has rather come down in the world since then and is now an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the...

Edmund Wilson has become an object of fantasy. A lot of desire is currently invested in him as the representative of a cherished role: the critic-as-generalist, the man of letters as cultural critic, or what in the last decade or more it has become common in the United States to call the ‘public intellectual’. Fantasies are, by definition, about the not-present, and all of these...

Do you speak Whiggish? The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not, it appears – at least not fluently. The original OED, compiled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contained full entries for ‘Whig’ and its adjectival derivatives, denoting that group or tradition which had been one of the two main contending forces in British political life...

“Broadly speaking, there are seven main sociological layers of subjects. First, there’s the burial in the Abbey layer: monarchs, statesmen, prelates. Next, the land and glory crowd: owning a lot of acres and killing a lot of foreigners have ever been among the most reliable passports to distinction in British life. Then there’s the Athenaeum Club: judges, writers, civil servants, scientists, professors. Next comes the Institute of Directors: the controllers of capital and the boss class generally. After that, the Hello! gang: the celebrated, the notorious, the newly rich, the eternally shameless. Then we have the historical oddities: the very old, the very weird and the very unlikely.”

It was all done with a pastry board and a bulldog clip. Sheets of paper were clipped to the board, the board rested on the arms of his chair and the fountain-pen began to cover the pages with a scrawl that barely hinted at intimations of legibility. Every day was much the same, weekday or weekend: a long morning at the board, lunch, a nap, errands, tea and then back to the board; a drink or...