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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... universities resort to when confronted with protests and complaints, from inside or outside. As Stefan Collini says in his trenchant study What Are Universities For? (2012), ‘compelling and often devastating criticisms appear to have had little or no effect on policy-making. The arguments have not been answered; they have merely been ignored. Rather ...”

“... In​ Jill Paton Walsh’s novel Goldengrove (1972), set shortly after the Second World War, the adolescent heroine, Madge, goes on holiday to Cornwall. She falls a little in love with a professor of English literature who has been blinded in action, and reads aloud to him. One of the passages he has her recite is an analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’:Weep me not dead means: ‘do not make me cry myself to death; do not kill me with the sight of your tears; do not cry for me as for a man already dead, when, in fact, I am in your arms,’ and, with a different sort of feeling, ‘do not exert your power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic magic’; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse ...”

“... whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets under his skin is intellectuals being snobby and condescending, and in his impressively disgusted book The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) he had no problem collecting some pretty dreadful opinions about the ...”