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.

Who are the spongers now?

Stefan Collini, 21 January 2016

The central proposal of the Green Paper is to set up a Teaching Excellence Framework as a parallel to the existing Research Excellence Framework, which periodically assesses and scores the quality of the research done in all university departments. On the basis of these scores, league tables are constructed, ranking institutions’ output both overall and in individual disciplines, and central funding for research is distributed accordingly. The TEF will do something similar for teaching.

Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of...

Uncle Wiz: Auden

Stefan Collini, 16 July 2015

Auden​ loved aphorisms, extracts, notes, lists. It was not just the shortness of short forms that he approved of: he liked their refusal of system even more, their acknowledgment that fragmentariness can only ever be papered over, never wholly subsumed. The nearest he came to publishing an autobiography, which was not very near at all, was A Certain World (1970), a commonplace book made up...

Whisky out of Teacups: David Lodge

Stefan Collini, 19 February 2015

In​ the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to...

Three hopes​ or dreams have played important parts in modern progressive politics in Britain in the decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal...

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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