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Review
Collini is the reviewer par excellence of our age. (David Stack, English Historical Review. )
These chapters are erudite, beautifully written, and impressive in their historical breadth. (English )
Collini...writes with lively wit and insight. Penetrating, down-to-earth, often hilarious, these essays are perfect brain food (Christopher Hirst, The Independent )
The chapters are erudite, beautifully written, and impressive in their historical breadth... this book... represents clear proof that had he written nothing else, Collini would still be one of the few academics reviewing today whose work deserves reprinting in collected form. (Mary Hammond, English )
Books do furnish a mind, and in a form that bailiffs cannot repossess. Collini is that rare bird, a don who can be read with pleasure by the non-specialist reader, to whom this book is addressed. (Michael Barber, Books of the Year, The Tablet )
These chapters are erudite, beautifully written, and impressive in their historical breadth. (English )
Collini...writes with lively wit and insight. Penetrating, down-to-earth, often hilarious, these essays are perfect brain food (Christopher Hirst, The Independent )
The chapters are erudite, beautifully written, and impressive in their historical breadth... this book... represents clear proof that had he written nothing else, Collini would still be one of the few academics reviewing today whose work deserves reprinting in collected form. (Mary Hammond, English )
Books do furnish a mind, and in a form that bailiffs cannot repossess. Collini is that rare bird, a don who can be read with pleasure by the non-specialist reader, to whom this book is addressed. (Michael Barber, Books of the Year, The Tablet )
Product Description
In this series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Collini focuses on critics and historians who wrote for a non-specialist readership, and on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach that readership. Among the critics discussed are Cyril Connolly, V.S. Pritchett, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell, while the historians include A.L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, E.H. Carr, and E.P. Thompson. There are also essays on wider themes such as the fate of 'general' periodicals, the history of reading, the role of criticism, changing conceptions of 'culture', the limitations of biography, and the functions of universities. Explicitly addressed to 'the non-specialist reader', these essays make some of the fruits of detailed scholarly research in various fields available to a wider audience in a succinct and elegant manner. Stefan Collini has been acclaimed as one of the most brilliant essayists of our time, and this collection shows him at his subtle, perceptive, and trenchant best. The book will appeal to (and delight) readers interested in literature, history, and contemporary cultural debate.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. In this fascinating and superbly-written book, he explores a variety of celebrated writers, critics and historians, and analyses aspects of cultural life in 20th-century Britain.
He studies those over-rated Etonians, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell the Foreign Office nark and Aldous Huxley. He writes also of CIA front man Sir Stephen Spender, ex-philosopher Roger Scruton, the reviewers Rebecca West and V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant critics Edmund Wilson, William Empson and Perry Anderson, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart, and the historians A. L. Rowse, Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson.
He notes, "the disabling paradox of modern `conservatism' - namely, that it wants simultaneously to liberate market forces and to lament the effects of market forces." And he shows how those mainly stirred by opposition to liberal pieties, rather than by the real conditions that reformers aspire to remedy, end up as grumpy old Tories, like the tedious Scruton, who has dumbed himself down so publicly. Collini inveighs against the `anti-industrial nostalgia', shared by the literary elite and Greens, and against reactionary praise of the Empire.
Collini discusses very perceptively the ideas of Anderson, Carr and Thompson. This is a refreshing change from the all-too-numerous British intellectuals who have for a century presented endless idealist alternatives to Marxism, without ever condescending to mention it, never mind engage with it. The dishonest evasiveness of arguing against an absent opponent produced only vacuities.
Collini finishes with brilliant essays on the current state of literary criticism, on the idealising of Victorian culture, on the non-novelty of celebrity, Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the witless 2003 government White Paper The Future of Higher Education.
He studies those over-rated Etonians, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell the Foreign Office nark and Aldous Huxley. He writes also of CIA front man Sir Stephen Spender, ex-philosopher Roger Scruton, the reviewers Rebecca West and V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant critics Edmund Wilson, William Empson and Perry Anderson, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart, and the historians A. L. Rowse, Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson.
He notes, "the disabling paradox of modern `conservatism' - namely, that it wants simultaneously to liberate market forces and to lament the effects of market forces." And he shows how those mainly stirred by opposition to liberal pieties, rather than by the real conditions that reformers aspire to remedy, end up as grumpy old Tories, like the tedious Scruton, who has dumbed himself down so publicly. Collini inveighs against the `anti-industrial nostalgia', shared by the literary elite and Greens, and against reactionary praise of the Empire.
Collini discusses very perceptively the ideas of Anderson, Carr and Thompson. This is a refreshing change from the all-too-numerous British intellectuals who have for a century presented endless idealist alternatives to Marxism, without ever condescending to mention it, never mind engage with it. The dishonest evasiveness of arguing against an absent opponent produced only vacuities.
Collini finishes with brilliant essays on the current state of literary criticism, on the idealising of Victorian culture, on the non-novelty of celebrity, Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the witless 2003 government White Paper The Future of Higher Education.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant study of aspects of intellectual life in 20th-century Britain
2 July 2008
Format:Hardcover
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. In this fascinating and superbly-written book, he explores a variety of celebrated writers, critics and historians, and analyses aspects of cultural life in 20th-century Britain.
He studies those over-rated Etonians, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell the Foreign Office nark and Aldous Huxley. He writes also of CIA front man Sir Stephen Spender, ex-philosopher Roger Scruton, the reviewers Rebecca West and V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant critics Edmund Wilson, William Empson and Perry Anderson, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart, and the historians A. L. Rowse, Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson.
He notes, "the disabling paradox of modern `conservatism' - namely, that it wants simultaneously to liberate market forces and to lament the effects of market forces." And he shows how those mainly stirred by opposition to liberal pieties, rather than by the real conditions that reformers aspire to remedy, end up as grumpy old Tories, like the tedious Scruton, who has dumbed himself down so publicly. Collini inveighs against the `anti-industrial nostalgia', shared by the literary elite and Greens, and against reactionary praise of the Empire.
Collini discusses very perceptively the ideas of Anderson, Carr and Thompson. This is a refreshing change from the all-too-numerous British intellectuals who have for a century presented endless idealist alternatives to Marxism, without ever condescending to mention it, never mind engage with it. The dishonest evasiveness of arguing against an absent opponent produced only vacuities.
Collini finishes with brilliant essays on the current state of literary criticism, on the idealising of Victorian culture, on the non-novelty of celebrity, Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the witless 2003 government White Paper The Future of Higher Education.
He studies those over-rated Etonians, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell the Foreign Office nark and Aldous Huxley. He writes also of CIA front man Sir Stephen Spender, ex-philosopher Roger Scruton, the reviewers Rebecca West and V. S. Pritchett, the brilliant critics Edmund Wilson, William Empson and Perry Anderson, the legal philosopher Herbert Hart, and the historians A. L. Rowse, Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Herbert Butterfield, E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson.
He notes, "the disabling paradox of modern `conservatism' - namely, that it wants simultaneously to liberate market forces and to lament the effects of market forces." And he shows how those mainly stirred by opposition to liberal pieties, rather than by the real conditions that reformers aspire to remedy, end up as grumpy old Tories, like the tedious Scruton, who has dumbed himself down so publicly. Collini inveighs against the `anti-industrial nostalgia', shared by the literary elite and Greens, and against reactionary praise of the Empire.
Collini discusses very perceptively the ideas of Anderson, Carr and Thompson. This is a refreshing change from the all-too-numerous British intellectuals who have for a century presented endless idealist alternatives to Marxism, without ever condescending to mention it, never mind engage with it. The dishonest evasiveness of arguing against an absent opponent produced only vacuities.
Collini finishes with brilliant essays on the current state of literary criticism, on the idealising of Victorian culture, on the non-novelty of celebrity, Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes, the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the witless 2003 government White Paper The Future of Higher Education.
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