“... in America and by Raymond Williams’s Arnoldian meditations in Culture and Society in Britain, Stefan Collini produced his impressive Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait in 1994. And there have been two cap-à-pie biographies: Park Honan’s in 1981 (with its provocative identification of ‘Marguerite’) and Nicholas Murray’s two years ago (with ...”

“... 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 friend to ‘bring it next time you come to the club’. Leslie Stephen, elected in 1877 on the strength of his History of English Thought in the 18th Century, enjoys the irony that this defence of free thought has given him ‘admission to a respectable haunt of bishops and judges ...”

“... nationalism he has a go at a senior contributor, Neal Ascherson, along the way. In the same spirit Stefan Collini takes a disparaging glance at Christopher Hitchens, a former contributor well known for his repertory of disparaging glances. No hard feelings, one hopes. ‘No harm done.’ ‘No hard feelings, one hopes.’ Inscrutable? Ironic? Playful? Or ...”

“... study in intellectual history, and its authorship exemplifies the unity and coherence of the art. Stefan Collini has made his reputation as the historian of late 19th-century sociological thought. Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm ...”

“... a whiff of well-hung grouse in the reactions he provokes, and it tends to linger in the house. Stefan Collini, for the opposition, imagines Hitchens ‘as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit’ (LRB, 23 January 2003). Colin MacCabe, for the friends, tells us that passages of the memoir, Hitch-22, are ...”

“... One of the few commentators who did not share the widespread admiration for Our Age was Stefan Collini (in an essay now reworked and reprinted in his English Pasts).* Sensing its ambivalent and sometimes contradictory voices, Collini teasingly observed that the book really had two authors: ‘Noel ...”

“... archaeology and had made one or two notable contributions to academic philosophy. But as Stefan Collini observes in his chapter on Collingwood in Absent Minds, if he had died in 1938 from his first stroke, his work would probably have earned ‘only a small footnote in the more conscientious surveys of 20th-century British philosophy and ...”

“... and to understate the potential popularity of ideas of free competition, despite what Stefan Collini sees as a ‘quite exaggerated sense of the capacity of individuals to control their own lives’. Goldman’s outlook on Fawcett’s economics leads him to undervalue the importance, not only to Fawcett but to Late Victorian Liberal ...”

“... Mill of On Liberty was not venerated outside sectarian circles until well into this century, as Stefan Collini has demonstrated. For his contemporaries, Mill’s standing rested mainly on his earlier, more hardminded achievement as logician and economist, which has little to do with his status today as a high priest of modern hedonistic ...”

“... except maybe a few dedicated followers of F.R. Leavis, here the subject of a judicious piece by Stefan Collini, who understandably wonders why he should believe that ‘the possibility of living a truly human existence depends on the quality of reviewing in the literary weeklies’. But he is only saying the claim is too high, not that it ...”

“... judgments in numerical form, but there is no standard unit of academic merit or worth. As Stefan Collini has observed, the attempt to put a number on something inherently immeasurable, such as the quality of teaching and research in UK universities, has resulted in the measuring of various ‘proxies’, often related to money and ...”

“... storm of comment’. It has now been republished with a lengthy and attentive introduction by Stefan Collini, along with a later lecture, ‘Luddites? Or, There Is Only One Culture’, in which Leavis responds to critics of his earlier performance. The performance survives rather well. At the time he was widely condemned for bad academic manners ...”

“... in the Jamaica controversy. He is troubled by the verdict of historians such as Catherine Hall and Stefan Collini that the organised attempts to bring Eyre and others to justice had, in Hall’s words, absolutely no effect. I doubt whether this is the real issue. Practically everything that happens has some effect. The Colonial Office, the War Office and ...”

“... and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his ‘genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains’). Bryce’s boast here, as in his political career, was that intensive travel and research gave him a superior expertise, and that this expertise ...”

“... to so many sales outlets for customers in need of livery for the market, remains arresting. Stefan Collini has compared the vice-chancellors and assorted notables who acquiesced in this disaster with the collaborators of occupied France. But Vichy was never just an isolated handful of traitors. How should the failure of the English academy as a ...”