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Articles by Stefan Collini
Squadrons of Pigs
Britain’s ‘world-leading’ university system is in deep trouble. There are, inevitably, conflicting diagnoses of the malady, but the indicators of deteriorating health are too ubiquitous to be ignored.
Eliot on the Run
Humankind, he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes, wearing a succession of masks, relying on routine to help him escape detection – even, it sometimes seemed, detection by himself.
Agent of Influence
Biographies of scholars often struggle to do justice to their subjects’ scholarship. Describing the slow, patient exploration of evidence and the stuttering formulation of interpretations need not be as exciting as watching paint dry, but scholarship remains an activity that is hard to communicate and nigh impossible to render in dramatic terms.
How did English literature become a university subject?
Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain Literature and Learning reveals the practical character and purpose of early English studies and overturns long-held views about the social role of the subject. By Stefan Collini April 11th 2025 Even if you didn’t ‘read English’ at university yourself, you almost certainly know plenty of people who did, and more or less everyone has had to study English literature at school at some point or other.
Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain
The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as ‘a soft option’. Its early professors responded by emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth century.
The future was social
When did the ‘modern’ era begin? For the European imagination across more than a millennium, the most significant divide was between antiquity and what followed, such that for some centuries ‘modern history’ was held to have begun with the fall of Rome. Applying a different filter, the category of the ‘Middle Ages’ indicated the post-Renaissance sense of an epoch between the ancient world and the ‘revival’ of learning, with the period from the late 15th century then becoming the first modern era.
Saturday Reviler
Every so often , a periodical comes along that sets the pace for a number of years thanks to the decisiveness of its editorial direction and the quality of its contributions. In 1855 the arrival of a new weekly journal represented one such transformative moment. The Saturday Review addressed itself to ‘serious, thoughtful men of all schools, classes and principles’, self-consciously distancing itself from the openly partisan character of most leading periodicals of the time.
Don’t pee in the lift
Have Britain ’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere.
A Goldsmiths Diary
These are desperate times in the UK higher education system. Every week there are closures of degrees or departments, and sizeable redundancies. Disproportionately it is the arts, humanities and social sciences that are affected, a consequence of their downgrading in recent years. The frequency with which common-sense opinion pieces in the tabloid press have questioned (and often ridiculed) the value of the liberal education prepares the ground for so many of these cuts.
Stefan Collini · Mainly Puddling: Thomas Carlyle’s Excesses
By 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from. ‘I am not worse in health than usual’ counts as a rare upbeat note.
Where to Draw the Line
Atax system is a political philosophy expressed in numbers. Although the introduction of a tax can seem to be just a matter of brute politics, public acceptance of a new imposition is affected by the extent to which a justification can be provided. Elements of economic theory usually figure in the argument, but there are also widely held, albeit conflicting, moral intuitions to appeal to, intuitions in which ideas of fairness and desert play some role.
Exaggerated Ambitions
When I tell people I’m writing a history of English studies as an academic discipline in Britain, I encounter the kind of baffled, pitying look likely to be provoked by saying I’ve spent the last ten years building a scale model of Westminster Abbey out of matchsticks. The idea of such a history seems to strike many people as at once unrealistically ambitious and largely pointless.
Is the Avant-Garde Still Avant-Garde?
The idea of an “avant-garde” tends to inspire complex emotions, oscillating between excitement at its glamour and scorn at its pretensions. The term carries an association of being daring, experimental, unconventional; the main body of practice or opinion that it is in “advance” of is usually figured as a monolith of dull orthodoxy.
Chimps and Bulldogs
Not everyone has a chimpanzee named after them. When the primate ethologist Jane Goodall called one of the troop she studied in Tanzania ‘Huxley’, it was an affectionate tribute to her colleague Julian Huxley, distinguished biologist and prominent popular science writer.
What next for the BBC? · LRB 21 April 2022
Attitudes to the BBC are, for the most part, spirit-sappingly predictable. Politicians of all parties believe it is biased against them. One powerful lobby claims it is a hotbed of radicals bent on undermining national identity, another that it is the mouthpiece of the establishment. Some critics denounce the licence fee as insulating the BBC against the bracing winds of competition, while others complain that the corporation has already abandoned its public service remit in the search for profit.
Rapture in Southend
It can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about. In his day (a day that, unfortunately for him, ended a decade or so before his death in 1946, a month short of his 80th birthday), H.G. Wells was one of the world’s leading literary and intellectual celebrities. Hailed as ‘a man of genius’ on the appearance of his breakthrough book, The Time Machine (1895), he went on to publish roughly two books a year for the next five decades.
Snakes and Ladders
Vol. 43 No. 8 · 22 April 2021 Stefan Collini refers to the ‘unaccountable power of the distant executives of a for-profit academy chain’ (LRB, 1 April). But no such entity as a ‘for-profit academy chain’ exists – indeed legislation specifically excludes for-profit organisations from the academy programme. (Much to the chagrin of companies such as Cognita, which would like to have been involved in this Labour-initiated scheme).
On the ‘TLS’ · LRB 5 November 2020
In July 1921, Alfred Harmsworth – by then ennobled as Viscount Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, the Times, and numerous other publications – wrote in irritable mood to the managing director of the Times about the ‘Lit Supp’, as the Times Literary Supplement was known.
Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee review - an exceptional biography
Photograph: Lichfield Archive/Getty Images In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has his Oscar Wilde character describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes”. Quoting that line in his biography (twice) is a nice touch. Almost 1,000 pages is a lot of mesh, and it’s best not to press too hard on what might be meant by “our real life”: in Stoppardia, such questions tend to lead to long speeches about chaos theory.
Aspiration etc… · LRB 8 April 2010
Historians have a taste for labels that capture the character or spirit of a period – The Bleak Age, The Age of Equipoise or, in a recent work on the interwar period, The Morbid Age. It will serve early 21st-century Britain right if it becomes known as ‘The Aspirational Age’. To those who can use the word ‘aspirational’ without wincing, this might seem high praise. It connotes endeavour, making something of oneself, trying – as an older idiom had it – to improve one’s station in life.
Kept Alive for Thirty Days
How much does your spouse or partner love you? Is it more or less than other people love their partners? To find out, we would need to measure the available evidence. Suppose that having identified the relevant population, we count how many times a week partners are brought tea in bed, how many times they are cuddled, how many times they are told ‘I love you,’ and so on.
Stefan Collini, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Thomas Jones and Andrew O’Hagan
Stefan Collini, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Thomas Jones and Andrew O’Hagan Your browser does not support the audio element. Stefan Collini talks to Thomas Jones about the life and work of Frank Kermode, and Mary-Kay Wilmers remembers him as a contributor to the LRB.
Stefan Collini · Early Kermode · LRB 13 August 2020
Ihadn’t been expecting to bump into Frank in one of the remoter stacks of the Cambridge University Library. This is where they keep the back numbers of old scholarly periodicals, a morgue only likely to be violated by those, like me, who now spend their days picking over the cairns left by academic labourers seventy years ago. And Frank Kermode had been dead for almost ten years – he died on 17 August 2010.
E.P. Thompson’s Search for a New Popular Front
E.P. Thompson’s search for a new Popular Front. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark E.P. Thompson at an anti–nuclear weapons rally in 1980. (Kim Traynor) Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.
‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit
Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt.
In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled
‘How do you write like the Economist?’ a new member of staff asked as he began to compose his first leading article for the paper some years ago. ‘Pretend you are God,’ a senior colleague replied. Given that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into practice. Browsing leaders from the previous couple of decades might have yielded a more concrete sense of what was wanted.
Hegel in Green Wellies
Condition of England writing is the product of a perceived acceleration in the pace of social change. We owe the term to Carlyle, writing in the 1830s, when the ‘Condition of England Question’ largely turned on the nature of the link between a new form of economic activity (then just coming to be termed ‘industrialism’) which promised undreamed of material abundance, and a newly visible degradation in the living conditions of the urban poor.
The Enlightened Vote
Please sign in to read the full article. Login ‘Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘‘What Is a Nation?’ and Other Political Writings’ by Ernest Renan, translated and edited by M.F.N. Giglioli · LRB 19 December 2019
‘Whatever may be the judgment of time on the intrinsic value of Renan’s contribution to the sum of knowledge, he can never lose his place among the few great names in the history of letters.’ This assessment from the 1901 edition of Chambers’s Encyclopedia, equally striking today for its confidence and its remoteness, summarises the conventional wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century. The only figure of comparable range and standing Chambers could think to compare Renan to was Erasmus.
The Two Cultures
Crossref Citations This book has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef. Gearon, Liam 2018. Paradigm shift in religious education: a reply to Jackson, or why religious education goes to war. Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 39, Issue. 3, p. 358. CrossRef Google Scholar Széll, György 2018. Western and/or universal social sciences?. Asian Journal of German and European Studies, Vol. 3, Issue.
Senses of the past by Paul Dean
Phrases from R. G.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Ian Watt’ by Marina MacKay · LRB 9 May 2019
‘My military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That experience began when the 24-year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941. After a 20,000-mile journey by sea, the Suffolks arrived in Singapore on 29 January 1942. Unfortunately, the Japanese arrived less than two weeks later.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ by Jerry Z. Muller and ‘The Metric Tide’ by James Wilsdon et al · LRB 8 November 2018
How much does your spouse or partner love you? Is it more or less than other people love their partners? To find out, we would need to measure the available evidence. Suppose that having identified the relevant population, we count how many times a week partners are brought tea in bed, how many times they are cuddled, how many times they are told ‘I love you,’ and so on.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘C.S. Lewis’ by Alister McGrath · LRB 20 June 2013
It is difficult to write about C.S. Lewis without giving offence. Most authors have their admirers, and literary sectarianism is hardly rare, but Lewis is unusual in being at the heart of more than one cult, having excelled in genres where attachments are warmest and the cool touch of analysis can be most resented, such as popular religious writing and children’s literature.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Letters of T.S. Eliot’ edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden · LRB 30 August 2012
Writing in his best haughty-provocative manner, T.S. Eliot described Coleridge as ‘one of those unhappy persons … of whom one might say that if they had not been poets, they might have made something of their lives, might even have had a career’.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. IV’ edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck · LRB 1 December 2016
Faced with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down.
The Marketisation Doctrine
‘But why have they done this?’ Standing in the foyer of the National Theatre in Prague, having just taken part in a debate on ‘The Political Role of Universities?’, I had fallen into conversation with a former rector of Charles University, who was asking me to explain the dramatic and – as we both thought – damaging changes imposed on British universities in the past decade.
LRB · Stefan Collini · Diary: The Marketisation Doctrine
‘But why have they done this?’ Standing in the foyer of the National Theatre in Prague, having just taken part in a debate on ‘The Political Role of Universities?’, I had fallen into conversation with a former rector of Charles University, who was asking me to explain the dramatic and – as we both thought – damaging changes imposed on British universities in the past decade.
“Speaking of Universities” with Stefan Collini and Amia Srinivasan | Events at Waterstones Bookshops | Waterstones
With university strikes continuing, lecturers working to contract and some even resigning from external examiner positions the need to understand the on-going changes to the university is more important than ever.
E.P. Thompson’s Search for a New Popular Front
E.P. Thompson at an anti–nuclear weapons rally in 1980. (Kim Traynor) Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation , check out our latest issue . Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation , check out our latest issue .
Speaking of Universities
A devastating analysis of what is happening to our universities Does "marketization" threaten to destroy what we most value about education? Will this new era of "accountability" distort what it purports to measure? What do we mean by a "public" system of higher education and how should we defend it? Globalization has transformed the economic horizon. At the same time governments have systematically imposed new regulations for funding, governance, and assessment.
Can we trace our age of anger back to the enlightenment?
Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra (Allen Lane, £20) The constant temptation in immediate commentary on world events is to overreact and overexplain. At the moment, we are being told that our world has been turned upside down, that democracy doesn’t work, that human motivation has changed, that evidence has ceased to matter, and any number of other over-heated simplifications.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Against Everything’ by Mark Greif · LRB 20 October 2016
When the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at ‘a time when serious writing about culture has become the exclusive province of bullies, reactionaries and Englishmen’.
Stefan Collini · Who are the spongers now?
In After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre raised the disquieting possibility that what we take to be ‘the’ language of morality now amounts to little more than a collection of verbal remains – husks from which the kernels of coherent moral beliefs have long since been removed. ‘What we possess … are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Roy Jenkins’ by John Campbell · LRB 5 June 2014
Three hopes or dreams have played important parts in modern progressive politics in Britain in the decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of reason and enlightenment.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Unleashing Aspiration’, ‘British Social Attitudes’ and ‘An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK’ · LRB 8 April 2010
Historians have a taste for labels that capture the character or spirit of a period – The Bleak Age, The Age of Equipoise or, in a recent work on the interwar period, The Morbid Age. It will serve early 21st-century Britain right if it becomes known as ‘The Aspirational Age’. To those who can use the word ‘aspirational’ without wincing, this might seem high praise. It connotes endeavour, making something of oneself, trying – as an older idiom had it – to improve one’s station in life.
Stefan Collini reviews ‘Quite a Good Time to Be Born’ by David Lodge and ‘Lives in Writing’ by David Lodge · LRB 19 February 2015
In the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation’.
The Duel: Is there such a thing as correct English?
Simon Heffer: There is such a thing as correct English. It is the standard form of communication used when one English speaker or writer wishes to ensure that he or she is not misunderstood by another. It is the English from which all other dialects and patois are derived. It is codified in English grammars. The Oxford English Dictionary has, since its completion in 1928, defined the meanings of words.
Book review: Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story by Matti Friedman
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The Hebrew of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is very different from the kind I was taught at synagogue. Wounded soldiers are “flowers.” Dead soldiers are “oleanders,” “their dicks were broken.” “Lebanon,” for the Israeli writer Matti Friedman’s generation, means not just a country—but also the muddied experience of their youth as military conscripts.
By Ben Judah, Philip Ball Verified, Stefan Collini, John Kay, Noo Saro-Wiwa Verified, Philip Collins Verified
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Prospect Magazine
Verified
The Costs of University Privatisation · LRB 23 October 2013
It’s time for the criticism to stop. Whatever you think about the changes to higher education that have been made in recent years, in particular the decision in the autumn of 2010 largely to replace public funding of teaching with student fees, this is now the system we’ve got. Carping about the principle or sniping at the process is simply unhelpful: it antagonises ministers and officials, thereby jeopardising future negotiations, and it wins little sympathy from the media and wider public.
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