Stefan Collini

“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...

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...

“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.”

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.