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“... despite having a covetable job as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, Robin Collingwood disliked college life and despised academic forms of thought and writing, especially in philosophy. If the responsibilities attached to his job were performed expeditiously, it was only because he refused to give them a moment’s more attention than ...”

“... An Autobiography​ ’ by R.G. Collingwood must be one of the most popular philosophical books in the English language, but when it was published in 1939, it was not expected to do well. Collingwood warned Oxford University Press that it was ‘destitute of all that makes autobiography saleable ...”

“... Robin Collingwood (1889-1943) was born 17 years after Bertrand Russell and died 27 years before him. Given the style and content of Collingwood’s philosophical work, this fact ought to seem surprising. For there is no apparent mark of Russell’s influence, nor of those who influenced him, upon Collingwood’s own philosophical corpus ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”

“... In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious than the last, that would kill him within five years. The usual treatment in the 1930s was less effective than modern medical intervention but rather more enjoyable ...”

“... Inglis presents under this rubric are William Morris, T.H. Green, John Maynard Keynes, R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take ...”

“... or when the mark of approval goes only to those with average views. Take the case of R.G. Collingwood, who had no radio or television career and did not write for the newspapers, who was an exceptional scholar and philosopher, but who never lived up to his own expectations, and who figures here as an example of ‘one distinctively British way of ...”

“... Are they not just a medieval anachronism?The answer to this seems to have been first given by R.G. Collingwood, in a few ill-advised sentences at the very end of his section of the Oxford volume on Roman Britain and the English Settlements. There he suggested that Artorius/Arthur could have been the commander of a late Roman field army, not of tramping ...”

“... Osbert Sitwell, by contrast, thought it a ‘wistful, unique monument of widowhood’, but R.G. Collingwood found it to be ‘visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous’. Hermione Gingold, on the other hand, presumably unaware of this swingeing condemnation, wanted to take it to her Desert Island, along with her discs. In part, perhaps, this bemused ...”

“... retained Gibbon’s footnotes, but reinforced them with notes of his own – provoking R.G. Collingwood, for whom Gibbon was himself a phenomenon of living history, to remark that this was like playing an Elizabethan madrigal with a saxophone obbligato – and he supplied an Introduction studded with the names of Reifferscheid, Büttner-Wobst, Zachariä ...”

“... does not discuss it, Hourani was also strongly influenced by the lectures and writings of R.G. Collingwood, for whom history and the philosophy of mind were a single subject: in studying the past, one was studying the mind and its ways of knowing. ‘History is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying.’ For ...”

“... radical theories, such as those of the Idealist school associated with Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood, which identify all works of art with some inner state of mind of the artist? Wollheim argues that there is nothing in these objections that forces us to conclude that no works of art can be physical objects. But likewise he is careful to stress that ...”

“... philosophical texts of the past. All this will remind English philosophers of the ideas of R.G. Collingwood, who believed that philosophy was a branch of history – the history of the prejudices and presuppositions of the human mind. It will remind Classicists of Seneca’s sarcastic quip: quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est. And Gadamer’s own ...”

“... called him) on the site itself. In Minotaur, J.A. MacGillivray quotes the reaction of R.G. Collingwood, who declared that ‘the first impression on the mind of a visitor is that Knossian architecture consists of garages and public lavatories.’ There were plenty of other comments along similar lines. It was not only a question of ...”

“... is contemporary history.’ Earlier, Michael Oakeshott had said much the same thing, as did R.G. Collingwood a few years later. Worden does not quote or mention any of them, but as well as many other things his compelling book is in a sense a learned and lively commentary on Croce’s dictum. In accordance with that apophthegm, history is usually on the side ...”