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Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism by Colin Kidd - review by William Whyte

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Britain, Education

Defective Storeys

Degrees of Disgrace

Study in Longevity

Claret Yes, Tea Bags No

With God on Her Side

A Quarrel of Scholars

Rich in Meaning

Scholarship, Slander & Sherry

Where Wren Meets Richard Rogers

Who’s Afraid of Flying Buttresses?

The Students Who Went to Sea

The Great Wen Riseth

From Swinish Luxury to Socialism?

Dreaming in Concrete

A Cheat Dog-Collared

A Plague on All Your Glass Towers

The Battle of Big Ben

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Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. ‘He knew all about cheeses, wisteria, Rubens’s brushwork, herbaceous borders, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird-life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibniz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles, 17th-century military strategy, breeds of North African dog, the vowel-sounds of Afrikaans, the vegetation of the Minho valley.’ But ‘he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster’ and his comments on English literature, the subject he was ostensibly responsible for teaching, ‘seemed the kind of thing that Princess Margaret might say’.

Eagleton was probably a little unfair to Theodore Redpath, the polymathic model for this caricature. Although the playwright Simon Gray also thought him insipid, others disagreed. Gazing at Redpath over coffee, Sylvia Plath was so attracted by his ‘rich, chastened, wide mind’ that she ‘practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father’. But Eagleton was not wholly wrong about some of the people to be found working at Oxford and Cambridge in the middle decades of the 20th century. In St John’s College, Oxford, for instance, law was taught for forty years by a failed philosophy don who got up the subject almost overnight when it became clear he had no future as a philosopher (and, thus, no future as a don). Edwin Slade’s proud boast was that not a single undergraduate he taught ever got a first-class degree, and his main contribution to scholarship was a set of exacting rules on the order in which fruit should be circulated after dinner. The life of the mind, this was not.

There are three predominant modes of writing about universities and the people who work within them. One is Whiggish: taking today’s values as the goal towards which the arc of history was always intending to bend, it delineates a rise in standards over time. Another, increasingly popular in the glossy pseudo-­histories produced by many institutions, celebrates a sort of stasis, with the identity of the university fixed at its foundation and then perpetuated to the present day. The third and most common mode is the recessional: a threnody for the vanished greatness of an earlier period.

That sense of loss is especially apparent in works written by those recollecting the immediate past. It is evident, for instance, in the otherwise radical William Tuckwell’s nostalgic account of early Victorian Oxford, with its celebration of the ‘characters’ who apparently abounded in the unreformed university as well as the quality of their discourse. In the 1830s, ‘conversation was a fine art, a claim to social distinction’, he writes. ‘Their talk ranged wide; their scholarship was not technical but monumental.’ By the 1840s, Tuckwell bemoans, ‘characters were becoming rare’ and the fine art of talking was under threat.

As his title suggests, Colin Kidd’s deeply researched and insightful new book cleaves more closely to the declinist track than it does to either of the other two modes. It describes a few decades, from around 1950 to about 1980, ‘when the dons enjoyed high prestige, freedom and confidence’ and then narrates the great collapse of the Thatcher years, which left behind ‘a shrivelling of self-confidence, a narrowing of options, a waning of élan’. Just like Tuckwell, Kidd celebrates an age of ample, open, erudite conversation, while also implying that discussions around the high tables of Oxford and Cambridge are today somewhat subpar.

Still more, of course, this account resembles a book written by a key member of the generation Kidd describes: Noel Annan’s Our Age, published in 1990. Annan was indeed almost the beau idéal of the sort of Oxbridge figure that The Twilight of the Dons addresses. He was highly intelligent, well connected, with a good war behind him and an impressive ability to move between university and public life, broadcasting and reviewing along the way. In his book, Annan offered a...