This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs the sense of identity and of...

A richly textured work of history and a powerful contribution to contemporary cultural debate, Absent Minds provides the first full-length account of "he question of intellectuals" n twentieth-century Britain--have such figures ever existed, have they always been more prominent or influential elsewhere, and are they on the point of becoming extinct today?
Recovering neglected or misunderstood traditions of reflection and debate from the late nineteenth century through to the present, Stefan Collini challenges the familiar cliche that there are no "real" intellectuals in Britain. The book...

Matthew Arnold (1822-88), the leading man-of-letters of the Victorian age, has been the decisive influence on modern thinking about literature and criticism and his work has become an inescapable cultural reference point today.
In this stylish and entertaining book Stefan Collini examines the whole range of Arnold's literary, social, and religious criticism as well as his poetry, placing them in the context of the major intellectual controversies of the nineteenth century. By attending to the distinctive power of Arnold's writing to charm, tease, persuade, and irritate, the book provides...

In this series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Collini focuses on critics and historians who wrote for a non-specialist readership, and on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach that readership.
Among the critics discussed are Cyril Connolly, V.S. Pritchett, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell, while the historians include A.L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, E.H. Carr, and E.P. Thompson....

Bringing together the two major texts of Mill, On Liberty, a creed on liberalism and The Subjection of Women, which explores the political, economic and social position of women, the editor has also included Chapters on Socialism, which looks at various forms of socialism. The editor's introduction places these three works in the context both of Mill's life and of 19th-century intellectual and political history and assesses their continuing relevance.

Across the world, universities are more numerous than they have ever been, yet at the same time there is unprecedented confusion about their purpose and skepticism about their value. This title offers an argument for rethinking the way we see our universities, and why we need them.