Highbrow-baiting

Anyone who admits to doing research on British intellectual history will be used to a jovial slap on the back and a shout of 'Ha ha: British intellectual history – that shouldn't take you long – ha ha ha'. The comedians are of various kinds, ranging from crusty conservatives who admire us Brits for refusing to tolerate highfalutin' ergoteurs, to earnest progressives who despise us for not taking big ideas seriously. Either way the assumption is the same: intellect into Britishness will not go.

No one can have had to put up with more of these pleasantries than Stefan Collini, who over the past three decades has established himself as perhaps the most perceptive and wide-ranging historian of intellectual life in modern Britain. He teaches in the English faculty at Cambridge University, but has always refused to stay in his box. With books like Liberalism and Sociology (1979), Public Moralists (1991) and English Pasts (1999), he has demonstrated an astonishingly broad acquaintance with works of history, philosophy and social theory, in addition to the customary Eng. Lit. diet of novels, poems and plays. Take any British writer of the nineteenth or twentieth century that you have even vaguely heard of, and the chances are that Collini has written a concise critical study of their work and its origins and influences, seasoned with crisp irony and tempered with forgiveness and compassion. He seems to have read absolutely everything, and what's more he gives an uncanny impression that he was a good friend to practically every literate person in Britain in the past two hundred years.

Collini is fed up with the old commonplace about Britain as a nation without intellectuals – the 'absence thesis' as he calls it – and his latest book rebuts it thoroughly, conclusively and point by point. Britain has always had its fair share of eggheads, he finds; the only snag is that they have a long tradition of collective self-pity, chanting lusty laments about their imminent annihilation and railing against British culture for its failure to appreciate people like them. And the theme of Absent Minds is not so much British intellectuals in general, as their habit of getting carried away by a 'self-dramatizing longing for heroic possibilities', or losing themselves in fantasies of faraway lands where intellectuals are treated with the adoration they deserve. British intellectuals have a remarkable facility, it seems, for convincing themselves en masse that their country has done them wrong, and furthermore that things are going from bad to worse. In the eyes of the British public, they think, cogito ergo non sum.

One of the many places where this knotty dialectic keeps cropping up is in debates about broadcasting. Ever since the Second World War British intellectuals have regarded radio as essentially the opposite of lowbrow TV, and they have taken a proprietary interest in the Third Programme, which was founded in 1946 as a sanctuary for aesthetic refinement and mental rigour. From the outset it offered its listeners generous samplings of international modernism in music and literature, together with a vast menu of talks and lectures by high-minded speakers like Bertrand Russell, G. M. Trevelyan, Jacob Bronowski, Isaiah Berlin, E. H. Carr, Fred Hoyle and Herbert Butterfield. Whenever BBC managers proposed changes to the Third, they could be sure of being ambushed by squadrons of self-appointed leaders of the British intellectual world. In 1948, for example, E. M. Forster buttonholed the Director General to complain about the 'vulgarisation' of the service by means of 'light music'. And in 1957, when it was threatened with cuts in transmission time, T. S. Eliot denounced the plans as 'sheer vandalism', and 'a massacre' designed to placate 'the more moronic elements in our society'.

The cuts went ahead all the same, which might be regarded as proof of the powerlessness of British intellectuals in the face of public philistinism and corporate brutality. But the incident points in the opposite direction as well: it shows that the corridors of power were wholly...