Table of Contents

Part One: Writing Lives
1: On not getting on with it: the criticism of Cyril Connolly
2: Rolling it out: V. S. Pritchett's writing life
3: The Great Seer: Aldous Huxley's visions
4: Performance: the critical authority of Rebecca West
5: Man of letters as hero: the energy of Edmund Wilson
6: Plain speaking: the lives of George Orwell
7: Believing in oneself: the career of Stephen Spender
8: Smacking: the letters of William Empson
9: Disappointment: A. L. Rowse in his diaries
10: Believing in England: Arthur Bryant, historian as man of letters
11: Believing in history: Herbert Butterfield, Christian and Whig
12: The intellectual as realist: the puzzling career of E. H. Carr
13: Enduring passion: E. H. Thompson's reputation
14: Olympian universalism: Perry Anderson as essayist
15: Hegel in green wellies: Roger Scruton's England
Part Two: Reading Matters
16: 'The Great Age': the idealizing of Victorian culture
17: Always dying: the idea of the general periodical
18: Boomster and the Quack: the author as celebrity
19: Private reading: the autodidact public
20: The completest mode: the literary critic as hero
21: From deference to diversity: 'culture' in Britain 1945-2000
22: Well connected: biography and intellectual elites
23: National lives: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
24: HiEdBiz: universities and their publics
References
Acknowledgements
Index

About the Author

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall. A frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and other periodicals both in Britain and the USA, his previous books include Public Moralists (1991), Matthew Arnold: a Critical Portrait (1994, reissued 2007), English Pasts (1999), and Absent Minds:
Intellectuals in Britain (2006), all also published by Oxford University Press. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

`Review from previous edition He is acute, analytical and often killingly funny.'
Bevis Hillier, Daily Telegraph
`The book is a great pleasure to read.'
Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement
`This collection shows the considerable talents and erudition of one of Britain's finest essayists and writers. Collini is skilled at portraiture... His style is capacious, fair minded and unbuttoned, alert to the quirks of personality and the conflicts of creative restlessness.'
Ronan McDonald, THES
`Too many histories of literary and intellectual culture are stuck in the elegiac mode. Stefan Collini avoids this trap in this bracing collection. He is one of the finest essayists we have'
Jonathan Derbyshire, Prospect
One of the finest essayists we have.
`Collini writes with lively wit and insight.'
The Independent
`Collini's linguistic unpredictability is so refreshing... He fleshes out his thesis with sparkling accounts of distinct epochs'
Eve Patten, Irish Times
`fascinating and superbly-written'
Will Podmore