The latter part of Collini's book is mainly made up of a series of case studies focusing on particular individuals--T.S. Eliot, R.G. Collingwood, A.J.P. Taylor, George Orwell and A.J. Ayer. These studies do not quite live up to the promise held out in the early part of the book. For all of Collini's insistence that he wishes to produce a sustained argument rather than a collection of essays, these chapters often have the feel of extended book reviews. There is a sniffy tone in some of them. Cambridge historians talk of the old-fashioned "great books" school of intellectual history. Sometimes one feels that Collini is a master of the "mediocre books" school and that his subjects have been chosen so that he can draw attention to the naïveté or contradictions inherent in their approach--though I assume that his concluding sentence on Orwell, which recognizes that some fault or other "was, of course, partially offset by other, less culpable strains," contains an element of self-mockery.

Some obvious themes are given little attention. Several times Collini draws attention to the fact that writers under discussion assume that the intellectual is a "he," but Collini himself looks mainly at men and says little about differences between the sexes. He mentions Virginia Woolf several times but says nothing about how she was excluded from the institutions that educated her husband and brother (a matter she certainly regarded as important). Were there more female intellectuals at the end of the twentieth century than at its beginning and, if so, is this important? Would it be fair to say feminism provides one of the key links between specialized academic work and discussions of "general" matters? Is it significant that feminist intellectuals are still so often discussed in terms of their relations with men and, if so, is it significant that France's most famous feminist (Simone de Beauvoir) is known for her relations with Sartre, Claude Lanzmann and Nelson Algren while England's most famous feminist (Germaine Greer) is known mainly for her alleged relations with various members of the Manchester United soccer team?

Whole areas are left out. Surely economics is the single discipline that does most to address issues of general concern to the public--certainly economists are the academic specialists who are most likely to write in newspapers. Peter Jay was once widely regarded as "the cleverest man in England"; Ayer fussed over what the undergraduate Jay might have thought of his lectures. Wynne Godley was an influential figure in both the Treasury and at Cambridge University, as well as being a contributor on matters such as psychoanalysis to The London Review of Books. Both men were closely linked to other parts of the cultural or political establishment--Godley's father-in-law was the sculptor Jacob Epstein; Jay's father-in-law was, for a time, prime minister. Neither man is mentioned by Collini. There is no sense of why English economists have been better at reaching the general public than their French colleagues--a group of students at the École Normale Supérieure recently complained of their discipline's "autism"--or worse than their American colleagues, who produce all those snappy articles about "Why drug dealers live with their mothers."

In some ways, Collini's greatest strength--his grasp of debates in France--illustrates his weaknesses. He is steeped in the work on the history of French intellectuals done by Jean-François Sirinelli, Pascal Ory and Christophe Charle. However, for all the talk of France as a land of abstraction and grand theory, the French approach to the history of intellectuals is marked by detailed empirical work and number-crunching. This produces a great deal of useful information. It is, for example, important to know that a third of all students preparing for entrance to the École Normale in the interwar period were the sons of teachers--not least because it shows that Sartre and Raymond Aron, two of four men in their year who did not need scholarships, were richer than most of their classmates.

Collini does not try to match this statistical base, and the tantalizingly rare numbers he does drop into his argument--that, for example, there were 200 university teachers of philosophy in Britain during the 1950s, and that fifty of them taught at Oxford--make one feel that it would be helpful if he could. Sometimes Collini uses numbers in a misleading way. He talks of university expansion and how this changes the public to which intellectuals address themselves. But he says little about national differences here. The expansion of Continental universities (though not the grandest of French grandes écoles) was most spectacular during the 1960s; British universities expanded most sharply in the very different ideological climate of the 1980s and '90s.

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