For most of those now teaching English in schools or universities, Leavis is an irrelevance; for those being taught he could be said – in an expression he himself favoured – not to exist. The writing was already on the wall twenty years ago when the Council for University English sent a deputation to the Minister for Education and then complained that his point of view was that of an ‘unreconstructed Leavisian ’. This was a clear enough signal that the project Leavis had launched in the 1920s had failed, in part because of social changes he could never have fully anticipated, but also on account of flaws in the project itself. Yet in the years leading up to the Second World War, and for three or four decades afterwards, his influence was crucial in defining what the teaching of English ought to be. A measure of his success was that, to what must have been the extreme irritation of those of his Cambridge colleagues who taught the subject in a different way, the expression ‘Cambridge English’ was widely understood to mean only one thing. Leavis's approach gave the subject a coherence it has not since possessed or indeed appeared to want, diversity being the quality which, by accident or design, now seems more highly valued.

This book deals with the decline and fall of Cambridge English, its rise being a phenomenon of which I have no personal experience. The topic strikes me as important because English, in the sense of English literature, remains a major national concern. Millions of pounds of public money are spent on teaching it at both secondary and tertiary level, and a large section of the publishing industry would wither away if that teaching stopped. Many of those who review new books for the newspapers and magazines, or comment on them for the radio or television, read English at university, and what they have to say helps determine the quality of our cultural life. Literature may now play a subsidiary role in that life but language is still central to it so that the varieties of linguistic achievement the critics recommend, and the words they use in making their recommendations, remain significant.