In the second volume of his autobiography, Stephen Fry, who went to Cambridge almost twenty years after I did, refers to Leavis as a ‘sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance’. I take this to be more or less the current view, colourfully expressed; but it seems to me wrong on two counts. In the first place, the significance of Leavis in his own day was far from parochial. This was in part because he had established a power base in the schools to which my fellow students at Downing were the living testimony. From the beginning he had seen the importance of secondary education, writing with Denys Thompson a handbook for teachers called Culture and Environment. A diatribe against the modern ‘machine age’ and all that went with it, this book often appealed to the account of the decline in critical standards which Leavis's wife had provided in her Fiction and the Reading Public, and described various ways in which schoolchildren could be given a training in ‘critical awareness’ that would make them resistant to attempts by advertisers or journalists to debase their emotional lives. Thompson was himself a schoolteacher and, under the title Reading and Discrimination, he shortly went on to put together an anthology of passages from English literature for class use which was inspired by the Leavises and heavily reliant on their work. This was in the 1930s when Leavis was making contacts in the schools which would prove fruitful later. After a while he was able to send young men he had taught back into the system and build up an impressive network of influence, which he strengthened with the success (or notoriety) of his own publications.

Both these schoolbooks were empire building, not for its own sake but in the service of an ideal. What the ideal was can most economically be suggested by considering Leavis's concept of the English language as a transmitter of cultural value: ‘At the centre of our culture is language, and while we have our language tradition is, in some essential sense, still alive’. He insisted on the belief that it is only in the work of the greatest writers that English grows and develops in a fruitful way, with beneficial effects for the quality of life of all its users.