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THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORIAN AS CRITIC: REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF STEFAN COLLINI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2017

CESARE CUTTICA*
Affiliation:
Département d'études des pays anglophones, Université Paris 8 E-mail: cesare.cuttica@eui.eu, cesare.cuttica@univ-paris8.fr

Abstract

This article examines the work of the intellectual historian and critic Stefan Collini (1947–). It illustrates his methodological approach to the study of history; traces the unexpected similarities between his intellectual practice and that of cultural critics as diverse as Matthew Arnold and William Empson; points to the differences in content and vision informing his manifold scholarly pursuits and those of other intellectual historians (e.g. Skinner) as well as critics (e.g. Mulhern and Eagleton); and levels some criticism at his writings. Specific attention is given to the centrality of cadence, congeniality, irony and sympathy, as well as to the function of the intellectual portrait in his narrative. The article's main claim is that Collini's history writing is better understood as the embodiment of the activity of the intellectual historian as critic. Situated within a broad range of different historical and critical practices, Collini's own practice is thoroughly analyzed both for its intrinsic value and for providing an original picture of the activity generally referred to as “intellectual history.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Stefan Collini for responding positively to requests for interviews (cited by date and place). I thank Modern Intellectual History and its anonymous readers for their thorough comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

1 See e.g. Naughton, John, “Britain's Top 300 Intellectuals,” The Observer, Sunday 8 May 2011Google Scholar, at www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/may/08/top-300-british-intellectuals, accessed 19 June 2016.

2 See the review snippets in the paperback editions of Absent Minds, Common Reading, What Are Universities For?. For full details of these see, respectively, notes 27, 17 and 18 below.

3 Collini, Stefan, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford, 1999), 98Google Scholar.

4 He has an MA from Yale (1970).

5 Interview, 31 July 2015, Cambridge.

6 See Jeffrey J. Williams, “History Unabridged: An Interview with Stefan Collini” (Chapel Hill, NC, 26 Jan. 2013), 2. I thank Stefan Collini for providing me with the text of this interview. See also Williams, “Intellectuals and Politics: Stefan Collini,” in Williams, How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (New York, 2014), 97–103.

7 Clarke, Peter, “Burrinchini's Spectre,” London Review of Books 6/1 (19 Jan. 1984), 1213Google Scholar.

8 See e.g. the forum in Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (2007), 363–73, 381–7, 389–93; and Collini, Stefan, “Author's Response,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (2007), 395405CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the symposium in Political Studies Review 6/1 (2008), 1–31; and Collini, Stefan, “Author's Response,” Political Studies Review 6/1 (2008), 3241CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See e.g. the symposium in Sociology 47/2 (2014); and Collini, Stefan, “Response,” Sociology 47/2 (2014), 399406Google Scholar.

10 See e.g. Cuttica, Cesare, “Intellectual History,” in Wright, James D., ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, vol. 12 (Oxford, 2015), 255–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Interview, 15 July 2014, Cambridge.

12 Collini, English Pasts, 264.

13 Williams, History Unabridged, 2, 3.

14 Collini, “Author's Response,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 399–400.

15 Collini, English Pasts, 264.

16 For one of Collini's most searing critiques see Collini, Stefan, “No Bullshit Bullshit,” London Review of Books 25/2 (23 Jan. 2003), 36Google Scholar, where the target is Christopher Hitchens.

17 Collini, Stefan, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford, 2008), 117, 303Google Scholar.

18 Collini, Stefan, What Are Universities For? (London, 2012), 83, 74Google Scholar.

19 Collini, Stefan, Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate (Oxford, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, came out after the completion of this article.

20 For full bibliographical references see Williams, History Unabridged, 1–2.

21 Stefan Collini, “Eavesdropping in the Shrubbery: Intellectual History and Literary Criticism,” Prismas tenth anniversary issue, Intellectual History Today, 1–5, at 1–2 (the original is Collini, Stefan, “Escuchar a escondidas entre los arbustos: historia intelectual y critica literaria,” Prismas: Revista de historia intelectual 11/1 (2007), 165–9)Google Scholar.

22 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “The Blair in George Orwell,” The Guardian, 4 July 1998, 8Google Scholar (for articles appeared in The Guardian prior to the year 2000 no Web links are available and citations do not have the day of publication).

23 Collini, Stefan, “Introduction,” in J. S. Mill: On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Collini, Stefan (Cambridge, 2009Google Scholar; first published 1989), vii–xxvi, at xxv–xxvi.

24 Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 2006Google Scholar; first published 1991), 1.

25 Collini, Stefan, “Introduction,” in Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge, 2012; first published 1993), vii–lxxi, at ix.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., passim.

27 See Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar, passim.

28 Collini, Stefan, “The Golden Age That Never Was,” Times Literary Supplement, 18 Jan. 2002, 17Google Scholar.

29 Collini, Stefan, “The Literary Critic and the Village Labourer: ‘Culture’ in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series 14 (2004), 93116Google Scholar, e.g. 115–16.

30 Collini, Absent Minds, 454.

31 See e.g. Collini, What Are Universities For?, esp. 39–60.

32 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “For the Common Good,” Times Literary Supplement, 15 Jan. 2014, 35Google Scholar.

33 Collini, Stefan, “Dream of the Seventh Dominion,” London Review of Books 2/23 (4 Dec. 1980), 1920Google Scholar.

34 Collini, Stefan, Arnold (Oxford and New York, 1988), 80Google Scholar.

35 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “What Is Intellectual History?”, History Today 35/10 (1985), 4654Google Scholar; and Collini, “The Identity of Intellectual History,” in Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, eds., A Companion to Intellectual History (Chichester, 2016), 7–18.

36 Cuttica, Cesare, “Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–2009), Intellectual History and Its Future,” History of European Ideas 40/7 (2014), 905–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 909.

37 Collini, Stefan, “‘Discipline History’ and ‘Intellectual History’: Reflections on the Historiography of the Social Sciences in Britain and France,” Revue de synthèse 109/3–4 (1988), 387–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 391.

38 Collini, Stefan, Winch, Donald and Burrow, John W., “Prologue. The Governing Science: Things Political and the Intellectual Historian,” in Collini, Winch and Burrow, eds., That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 4–5.

39 Collini, Stefan, “Postscript. Disciplines, Canons, and Publics: The History of ‘the History of Political Thought’ in Comparative Perspective,” in Castiglione, Dario and Hampsher-Monk, Iain, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), 280302CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 298–9.

40 See Grafton, Anthony, “The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67/1 (2006), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 4–6, 17–18.

41 Collini, Stefan, “From Non-fiction Prose to ‘Cultural Criticism’: Genre and Disciplinarity in Victorian Studies,” in John, Juliet and Jenkins, Alice, eds., Rethinking Victorian Culture (London, 1999), 1328Google Scholar, at 26.

42 Collini, “Discipline History,” 390. On “the history of ideas” as better equipped to deal with long-term historical change compared to contextual surveying of a specific time see Gordon, Peter E., “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas,” in McMahon, Darrin M. and Moyn, Samuel, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York, 2014), 3255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Collini, Stefan, “As a Vocation,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 Nov. 2012Google Scholar, 3; Collini, Winch and Burrow, “Prologue,” 5–6.

44 One should consider Dominick LaCapra's critique of naive contextualism, and his call for “dialogic reading” with its historical reconstruction of the mental universe of an epoch through the examination of a plethora of sources. See LaCapra, Dominick, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” History and Theory 19/3 (1980), 245–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and LaCapra, Dominick and Kaplan, Steven L., eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982)Google Scholar.

45 Collini, Public Moralists, 5, 60.

46 Cesare Cuttica, “Intellectual History in the Modern University,” in Whatmore and Young, A Companion, 36–47, at 38.

47 Brian Young, “Intellectual History and Historismus in Post-war England,” in Whatmore and Young, A Companion, 19–35, at 32.

48 Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1914 (Cambridge 1983Google Scholar; first published 1979), 7 n. 15.

49 Collini, “The Identity of Intellectual History,” 13.

50 Ibid., 13, 14.

51 However, Collini's work offers no global perspective. This is the result of his focusing on tones and nuances of particular writings, which makes it difficult to go beyond one culture and one language without losing the fine texture. Like Skinner, he does not pay much attention to religion.

52 By casting light on E. P. Thompson's intellectual and moral “imagination,” and on his role as “cultural critic” engaged with literature, Collini placed the Marxist writer on the same cultural curve as Blake, Cobbett, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney and Leavis, thereby presenting a contextually richer account of this influential historian. Collini, Common Reading, 186.

53 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “Sold Out,” London Review of Books 35/20 (24 Oct. 2013), 312Google Scholar.

54 John, G. Pocock, A., “Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History” (2004), in Pocock, , Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009), 123–42Google Scholar, at 130, 132.

55 See Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar.

56 See Pocock, Political Thought, passim.

57 Collini, “Author's Response,” Political Studies Review, 40–41.

58 On Pocock's method see Kenneth Sheppard, “J. G. A. Pocock as an Intellectual Historian,” in Whatmore and Young, A Companion, 113–25, at 114.

59 See e.g. Collini, Absent Minds, 303–409, dealing with T. S. Eliot, Collingwood, Orwell, A. J. P. Taylor and A. J. Ayer.

60 See “Congenial Affinities: Collini and William Empson” below.

61 Collini, “Eavesdropping in the Shrubbery,” 3.

62 Stefan Collini, “‘On Highest Authority’: the Literary Critic and Other Aviators in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870–1930 (Baltimore, 1994), 152–75, at 153.

63 Williams, History Unabridged, 10.

64 Ibid., 11.

65 Ibid., 21.

66 Collini, Stefan, “Wild Man,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 Nov. 2007, 11Google Scholar.

67 Collini, Stefan, “Smack Up,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 July 2006, 3Google Scholar.

68 Collini, Stefan, “Against Utopia,” Times Literary Supplement, 22 Aug. 1997, 3Google Scholar.

69 Collini, Stefan, “Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain,” in Owen, Sue, ed., Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies (Basingstoke, 2008), 3356CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 41, 45, 47. For other references to “cadence” (in regard to e.g. Lytton Strachey's “Gibbonian cadence” and Malraux's oratorical “Racinian, even Roman, cadence”) see Collini, Stefan, “After the Last Despatch,” Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1985, 468Google Scholar; Collini, “All Their Yesterdays,” Times Literary Supplement, 17 Aug. 1990, 867; Collini, “Grand Illusion,” The Nation, 28 Feb. 2005, 23–6, at 26; Collini, “Marxism and Form,” The Nation, 12 Dec. 2005, 37–41, at 39; Collini, “Nika's Great Labour,” Times Literary Supplement, 28 Oct. 2011, 3; Collini, “Whisky out of Teacups,” London Review of Books 37/4 (19 Feb. 2015), 13–15, at 15; Collini, What Are Universities For?, e.g. 39, 45, 46, 57.

70 Collini, Public Moralists, 3–4.

71 Mulhern, Francis, “What Is Cultural Criticism?,” New Left Review 23 (Sept.–Oct. 2003), 3549Google Scholar, at 44.

72 Ibid., 48.

73 Ibid., 45–6.

74 Ibid., 49, 48.

75 Stefan Collini, “Preface,” in Collini, Arnold, vii–ix, at viii.

76 Ibid., 50, 52.

77 Arnold, Matthew, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), in Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Collini, Stefan (Cambridge, 1993), 2651Google Scholar, at 49.

78 Collini, Arnold, 2.

79 Collini, Stefan, “Blahspeak,” London Review of Books 32/7 (8 April 2010), 2934Google Scholar.

80 Collini, Stefan, That's Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect (London, 2010)Google Scholar, esp. 67.

81 Collini, Arnold, 15, 8.

82 Ibid., 92.

83 See ibid., 118.

84 Collini, Stefan, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” New Left Review 18 (Nov.–Dec. 2002), 7397Google Scholar, at 76–7.

85 Collini, Stefan, “Afterword to the Clarendon Paperback Edition,” in Collini, , Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait, 2nd edn revisited and with an Afterword (Oxford, 1994;), 125–38Google Scholar, at 131.

86 Ibid., 137.

87 Collini, Arnold, 118.

88 Ibid., 117.

89 Ibid., 67.

90 Ibid., 97.

91 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “Social Mobility: The Playing Field Fallacy,” The Guardian, Monday 23 Aug. 2010Google Scholar, at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/23/social-mobility-playing-fields-fallacy, accessed 20 Jan. 2016.

92 See Caine, Barbara, “Stefan Collini, Virginia Woolf, and the Question of Intellectuals in Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 369–73. Collini certainly concentrated on social milieus which were overwhelmingly male, and he did not challenge that dominance in his writing about them. While it is unfair to maintain that “Collini does have a woman problem” (see the review of Common Writing by William Whyte, Twentieth Century British History 27/3 (2016), 473–5, at 474), given that when he asked about Rebecca West's career as a public critic (in Common Reading) or Eileen Power's role as a public intellectual (in Common Writing), he was asking the same questions that he asked about the men who dominated those worlds, it is undeniable that gender—a larger category than “women”—is absent as an object of enquiry in its own right. Lamentable as this is from a scholarly point of view (he could have chronicled the why and how of women's marginalization from most of public cultural debate in Britain in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century), it is not sufficient a reason to earn him the label “sexist.”

93 Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” 88.

94 Collini, Absent Minds, 173–4, 179. Marxism for Collini is culpable of promising a metapolitical solution to the problems engendered by capitalism through the creation of a new society inspired by an excessively Hegelian philosophy of history where Marxist analysis holds the key to global “historical change.” Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” 90.

95 Ibid., 88.

96 Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?”, 41.

97 Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford, 1996), 36Google Scholar.

98 Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 2008; first published 1950), 187Google Scholar.

99 Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?,” 38.

100 Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 46, 62.

101 Stapleton, Julia, “British Intellectuals: Identity, Diversity and Change,” Twentieth Century British History 18/3 (2007), 391–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 395.

102 Mulhern, Francis, “Beyond Metaculture,” New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002), 86104Google Scholar, at 101.

103 Ibid., 101, 100.

104 Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford, 1996; first published 1983), 170–71Google Scholar.

105 Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” 100.

106 Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” 91–2, original emphasis.

107 Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” 91. See also Mulhern, Francis, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics (Cork, 1998), 87–8Google Scholar; for Collini's reply see Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” 95–6.

108 On “praxis” in this context see Simpson, David, “Politics as Such?”, New Left Review 30 (Nov.–Dec. 2004), 6982Google Scholar, at 70, original emphasis.

109 Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?”, 48, 49.

110 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 174.

111 Eagleton, Terry, “The Truth Speakers,” New Statesman 19/905 (3 April 2006), 5051Google Scholar, at 51. This consideration now sounds rather curious given Collini's That's Offensive! (2010), reviewing which Martha Nussbaum called attention—tellingly—to its lack of engagement with “the virtue of civility” as premise of all rational debate, especially when this involves “stigmatised groups.” Nussbaum, Martha, “American Civil War,” New Statesman 140/5044 (14 March 2011), 49Google Scholar.

112 Eagleton, “The Truth Speakers,” 51. To dispel any doubts about Collini's commitment to left politics see e.g. Collini, Common Writing, 306–8.

113 See Mulhern, “Beyond Metaculture,” esp. 100.

114 Collini, “Defending Cultural Criticism,” 91.

115 See e.g. Mulhern, “What Is Cultural Criticism?”, 41. Mulhern's remark is now misplaced given Collini's essays on higher education, freedom of speech, Thatcherism and present-day ideologies.

116 Collini firmly distinguished between “‘the political’ and ‘the public,’” underscoring that the former is not “constitutive of the intellectual's role.” Collini, “Author's Response,” Political Studies Review, 33.

117 Collini, Stefan, “On Variousness; and on Persuasion,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004), 6597Google Scholar, at 96–7.

118 See Collini, Stefan, “Introduction: Interpretation Terminable and Interminable,” in Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, with R. Rorty, J. Culler, C. Brooke-Rose (Cambridge, 1992), 121Google Scholar.

119 Collini, Stefan, “The Good of the Novel, edited by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan-Review,” The Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2011Google Scholar, at www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/good-of-the-novel-review, accessed 21 June 2016.

120 Collini, Absent Minds, 431.

121 Ibid., 468, 469.

122 On Judt's “admonitory” tone and on “pulpit”-seduced intellectuals see respectively Collini, Stefan, “The Reminder-General,” The Nation, 9 June 2008Google Scholar, 17–22, at 17, 18; and Collini, “The View from the Top Table,” The Nation, 29 Nov. 2010), 30–34, at 34.

123 See Jennings, Jeremy, “The View from Calais,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (2007), 381–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 384.

124 Collini, Absent Minds, 9.

125 Eagleton, “The Truth Speakers,” 51.

126 Collini, English Pasts, 229–30.

127 For similar considerations see English, James F., “Hazards of the Higher Debunkery,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (2007), 363–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 364, 368.

128 Interview, 14 April 2014, Cambridge.

129 See e.g. the review of English Pasts by Chris Waters, Victorian Studies 45/1 (2002), 153–5, at 154.

130 See Barker, Rodney, “On Stefan Collini: Absent Minds,” Political Studies Review 6/1 (2008), 1422CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 15; and Neill, Edmund, “Plus Ça Change: Some Criticisms of Stefan Collini's Absent Minds,” Political Studies Review 6/1 (2008), 2331CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 26, 30.

131 See Kenny, Michael, “Britain's Anti-intellectual Intellectuals: Thoughts on Stefan Collini's Absent Minds,” Political Studies Review 6/1 (2008), 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 11.

132 Barker, “On Stefan Collini,” 14.

133 Collini, Stefan, “General Introduction,” in Collini, Stefan, Whatmore, Richard and Young, Brian, eds., History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 4.

134 Williams, History Unabridged, 3.

135 Collini, Stefan, “Typescripts in a Drawer,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 Aug. 2011, 78Google Scholar.

136 See e.g. Collini, Stefan, “Mainly Fair, Moderate, or Good,” The Guardian, Saturday 22 Sept. 2007Google Scholar, at www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/22/radio.bbc, accessed 19 June 2016.

137 See e.g. Collini, Absent Minds, 331–49, on Collingwood's “cackling” as defining his being an intellectual; ibid., 384–5, on A. J. P. Taylor's “stylistic tics” such as reliance on “shocking or provocative” as markers of his unorthodox opinions; ibid., 405, on Ayer's use of “‘basic’ and ‘self-evident’” or phrases like “[m]anifestly false” to convey liberal certainties.

138 Williams, History Unabridged, 15.

139 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 44.

140 Collini, “Smack Up,” 4.

141 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 45.

142 Empson, William, “Note for the Third Edition,” in Empson, , Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth, 1973; first published 1930), 1718Google Scholar, at 17.

143 See Haffenden, John, “Introduction,” in Empson, William, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Haffenden, John (London, 1988), 163Google Scholar, esp. 10–21; for a quotation from Empson see ibid., 58 n. 50.

144 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 45.

145 Wood, Michael, “We Do It All the Time,” London Review of Books 38/3 (4 Feb. 2016), 79Google Scholar, at 9.

146 Collini, Stefan, “The Close Reader,” The Nation, 19 Feb. 2007, 23–8Google Scholar, at 24.

147 Haffenden, “Introduction,” 13.

148 Cited in ibid., 14. Empson, though, could be intolerant of other critics’ perspectives.

149 Cited in Collini, “The Close Reader,” 26.

150 Empson, “Preface to the Second Edition” (1947), in Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 7–16, at 14.

151 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 19.

152 Collini, “The Close Reader,” 28.

153 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 282.

154 Ibid., 284.

155 Collini, Stefan, “The Critic as Anti-journalist: Leavis after Scrutiny,” in Treglown, Jeremy and Bennett, Bridget, eds., Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet (Oxford, 1998), 151–76Google Scholar, at 154.

156 See Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 286–7.

157 Collini, “The Critic as Anti-journalist,” 175.

158 Collini, English Pasts, 257.

159 Collini, Stefan, “The Influence of the ‘Marginal’,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 Jan. 1999, 8Google Scholar.

160 Collini, “General Introduction,” 15.

161 Collini, What Are Universities For?, 83–4.

162 Cuttica, “Eavesdropper on the Past,” passim. Collini used this image in e.g. Collini, Stefan, “Upwards and Onwards,” London Review of Books 30/15 (31 July 2008), 1316Google Scholar.

163 Collini, Stefan, “The Prophet of the Obvious,” Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 1981, 275–6Google Scholar.

164 Collini, Stefan, “Having Emotions the Manly Way,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1999, 6Google Scholar.

165 Collini, Stefan, “What's Not to Like?”, London Review of Books 33/11 (2 June 2011), 1012Google Scholar.

166 Ibid.

167 Collini, “As a Vocation,” 5.

168 See e.g. Collini, Absent Minds, 324–5.

169 Collini, What Are Universities For?, 195.