With a lighter spirit but excellent good humour, Stefan Collini brings to life some of the greatest essayists, historians and critics of the 20th century in this collection of articles from the last eight years. His wide-ranging perspective pans past Huxley in South California in the 1950s (mescalin-high, searching for truth at the door of L Ron Hubbard), sweeps over Orwell at the Lenin barracks in Barcelona signing up for the militia as ‘Eric Blair, grocer’, and listens to the anything but shy Stephen Spender tell the world about how it ‘disgusts me to read a newspaper in which there is no mention of my name’ (p87). Collini also lets his subjects and their contemporaries illuminate each other. Cyril Connolly on Orwell: ‘he could not blow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry’ (p18). Virginia Woolf on Rebecca West: ‘a cross between a charwoman and a gypsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes, very shabby, rather dirty nails, immense vitality’ (p56).

Enlivened by such vignettes, Collini’s essays cast a spotlight on the tightrope walked by many of these men and women of letters, who oscillated between generalist literary journalism and academic specialism. These intellectuals strove to give their work and lives meaning through engagement with the public in a way that is rare today. Common Reading ranges further, however, than just reviews of new biographies and collected works: it takes in essays on Victorian periodicals, working class autodidacts, British culture from deference to diversity and the contemporary role of the university. These are snackable pieces, easily swallowed, and eat-in-any-order: a set-menu, however, might just recommend a couple of dishes from Part II as starters and theme-establishing palate cleansers, then a filling spread of critics and historians from Part I, before rounding out the key themes of the book with an afters of culture and universities.

As Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, Collini is well placed to elucidate his chosen field. Not only is his knowledge more than exhaustive, his style too rivals that of some of his subjects in concision and exquisitely mannered phrases. In just one sentence he gives us The Making of the English Working Class:

For Thompson, writing history involved an act of political imagination, so habitual as to be second nature, by which the daily pressures under which the poor lived, above all the pressures of economic exploitation and political harassment, were not buried by what he once called ‘clumpish’ terms, such as ‘culture’ and ‘class’, nor bathed in the rosy glow of the comfortable modern reader’s nostalgia, but focused in the most mundane details about the extent of the wasteland on which the Warwickshire cottager could run his pig, or about the number of days on which Cornish tin-miners supplemented their income by pilchard fishing, or about the wording of the by-law protecting the Northamptonshire labourers’ ‘liberty to cut rushes at Xmas and not after Candlemas’ (p185).

As we move from the flashy lives of the writers into the more rarified reaches of historians and critics, Collini starts to warm to some of his themes. Nostalgia is a key one, and the pervading sense of loss, pessimism and ennui common to so many 20th century thinkers is well explored throughout the book. It will be no surprise that the author of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain should argue that these narratives of cultural decline, sorrowful ‘condition-of-England’ thinking, and accounts of the death of the critic are perhaps premature. And perhaps they are. In some ways culture (or maybe ‘cultures’, for they are now multi) is everywhere today: more people read more, devour films and blockbuster exhibitions; the government is set to make sure our children get five hours of culture a week. Culture seems to have been democratised. It is these reading publics – the ‘common’ readers - that Collini explores in Part II.

Just under half of the book is devoted to ‘the nature of the diverse publics for whom these figures wrote, and to the cultural traditions and institutional frameworks within which they operated’ (p1). Reading ‘The Great Age’ on Victorian culture, or ‘Always Dying’ on periodicals, it is possible to impute a hypothesis to the book: namely that generalist intellectuals trying to write for wider publics always feared falling into a narrow and irrelevant academic specialism because they believed in the universalism of the arts, in the Great Tradition. Yes, they were incredibly elitist (on Spender: ‘there really is an underclass of people who envy and hate us all’ (p91)), but they did believe in truth, in the highest standards, in achieving excellence through hard work. Even reading the daily routines of some of these writers as revealed by Collini is exhausting. Nowadays, however, the watchwords are ‘diversity’ and ‘access’ rather than the universal and the difficult. What has changed?

‘From Deference to Diversity’ traces broad cultural changes in post-war Britain: away from the paternalism of the early BBC and the elitism and snobbery of so much of the arts. Collini’s drivers for change are working class affluence and the ‘embourgeoisement of the working class’, by which he means the adoption of ‘broadly middle-class attitudes and ways of life’, including ‘more individualistic and self-interested political allegiances’ (p272). These changes, combined with rapid technological innovation (television and the internet), explain the decline of deference. In other words, the cloth caps are off, we are all middle class now and won’t be talked down to by the toffs. For Collini this is a problem because it means the loss of one (albeit elitist) ‘form of confidence…without it yet being replaced by another that would allow discriminations of quality to be persuasively made on intrinsic rather than merely instrumental grounds’ (p282). All we have is a philistine logic which allocates funds solely on grounds of popularity and accessibility.

And yet perhaps there is a deeper problem here. There is another dimension to the trajectory from deference to diversity than the suspension of the class struggle and the end of the politics of left and right. No one gave up the fight just because they could afford a television set: rather, working class political movements were defeated and the working class lost its distinctive political identity. Winning this battle, however, exacted a heavy toll on the victors on the right, who had to sacrifice ideas of progress and historical change, concepts appropriated by the left and the Soviet Union to such an extent that they had become too hot to handle. And in so doing opened the door to relativism, to ‘histories’. The legacy of this compromise is the no-ideas, no-party, no-vision politics of today, and, in the cultural sphere, an inability to discriminate between good art and bad rubbish.

Collini does argue the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture disappeared because the single hierarchy of cultural forms underpinning this distinction relied on ‘the connection between social status and cultural authority’ (p270). On its own, however, the loss of authority by the old elites might be no bad thing, if they had been knocked off their pedestals. Since they jumped rather than were pushed, we have all landed deep in rudderless cultural relativism. It is in this context, and in the absence of any progressive politics, the loss of authority becomes more pernicious than maybe Collini allows for. This is a unique problem in human history; not a swing of the intellectual pendulum as Collini would have it.

There is maybe also a unique opportunity to take an active role instead of passively waiting for a new elite to form. We should not accept uncritically the critic-as-blogger-in-his-own-bedroom as a substitute for Leavis. Nor Richard and Judy as a Richard Hoggart. And Ed Balls is definitely no Miss Jean Brodie. Rather, we need an open public discussion about the nature and role of criticism in contemporary times. And we must breathe new life into the idea of being a teacher*: somebody with the authority to say no when someone is wrong or ignorant; and not to appeal to the idea of ‘different cultural experiences’ to brush the error under the carpet. That ends up dismantling standards of across-the-board excellence. If this is elitism, we need to defend it openly. Otherwise, the unspoken elitism concealed in the anti-elitism of the cultural relativists - those who claim there is not one truth but many and in so doing dumb down the public sphere - will continue to pander down to us.

Above all we need the reader-as-critic. Engaged, public and political critics. Critics who are not afraid, as Collini well observes, of being ‘vulnerable to the accusation of condescension’ (p5). It is we who are being condescended to if we allow ourselves to be hushed up by the you-can’t-say-that-brigade in the name of keeping relative calm. Here we can certainly learn a lot from Collini as he brings to life some of the less well-known intellectuals and writers of the 20th century. While one may have heard of Cyril Connolly, might even know his reputation as a society wit, his The Unquiet Grave has laid undisturbed for some time now. Rebecca West too was new to me – never having opened a copy of the Sunday Telegraph in the 1980s. Likewise with historian Arthur Bryant, English patriot and Nazi apologist. Hopefully it does not make me a Nazi apologist apologist to point out that at least he was trying to argue with his public for his vision of society and that, without such critical public engagement, society is going nowhere.

There may be those who point out this is not exactly the stuff of common reading, though, is it? Nine each of these pieces come from the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. The combined circulation of these two journals is around 75,000, which ‘make[s] up only a small subset of what is rather cavalierly referred to as “the educated reading public”’ (p2). It is a very certain sort of readership that Collini is addressing himself to here: is he not an elitist in the bad old mould? In a way, this is precisely the point. Yes, these essays are sometimes difficult and sometimes the subject matter may be unfamiliar, so all the more reason to take up the challenge and learn something new from a real authority. The critical readers we need today should not be afraid to explore the unknown: after all, ‘radical readers found inspiration for their radicalism in the authoritarian Carlyle’ (p253). And readers and critics alike could do worse than remember that there are only self-imposed limits in this world and agree with Edmund Wilson that: ‘the human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society’.