Absent minds is a study of ‘the question of intellectuals in twentieth-century Britain’, rather than (or more than) ‘intellectual life’ and the substantive contributions of particular writers and thinkers (pp. 1, 7). The book is an argument about, and with, the ways in which intellectuals have been taken variously to be absent from, alien to, or insufficiently supported by Britain. In one version of this ‘absence thesis’, Anglo-Saxon attitudes militate against the emergence of the ‘real’ intellectuals imagined to populate other countries, especially France. Another version locates authentic British intellectuals only in the past, before a unified ‘public’ was broken up by the forces of academic specialization or celebrity culture.

Such claims range from the highly contestable to the demonstrably false, and a good many have been made by people who themselves could very reasonably be described as intellectuals. What explains this persistent pattern of denial? Collini is acutely sensitive to the local accents of these claims, but he argues that the tendency to situate real intellectuals somewhere else in space or time is a consequence of the logic of the concept of ‘the intellectual’ itself, rather than a product of distinctive British conditions. Collini uses the term ‘intellectual’ in a specific sense, referring to figures who move between specialized expertise and more general concerns and audiences. To move between a specialism and the ‘necessarily more contestable perspective of a “non-specialist”’ is to stake a claim to a position of cultural authority that is inherently precarious; the existence of the ideal and the incompleteness of any actual performance of it foster suspicions that the here-and-now falls short of a foreign norm or a golden age (see esp. pp. 57–9).

Collini's method ‘owe[s] more to literary criticism than to political science or sociology’: voice, genre, audience, and the ‘texture’ of discussion (a recurrent term) are particularly important to his analysis (p. 8). The central chapters (parts 2 and 5) trace the ways the question of intellectuals has been posed and answered, how assumptions and stereotypes have formed and re-formed, and relate these developments to changes in the media and education. In the process, Collini provides searching critiques of historiographically as well as historically important essays such as Noel Annan's ‘The intellectual aristocracy’ and Perry Anderson's ‘Components of the national culture’. Other chapters compare British debates about intellectuals with those in other settings, and offer case studies of exemplary individuals' discomfort with, even ‘denial’ of, the role of the intellectual even as they performed it. Those on academics – A. J. P. Taylor, R. G. Collingwood, and A. J. Ayer – are especially illuminating. T. S. Eliot and George Orwell do not quite fit the bill – from the beginning of his career, Orwell was a generalist writer on politics, society, and literature, not a professor of Tibetan who moved into pronouncements on contemporary affairs – but they enable Collini to analyse a complex and influential seam of ambivalence and, in Orwell's case, ‘the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual’ (p. 372). It is a persuasive argument, though the focus of the question of intellectuals necessarily yields a more anti-intellectual Orwell than a study of Orwell's practice of cultural criticism would.

The chapters on France and the United States, together with briefer discussions of Germany, Italy, and Spain, show how many of the anxieties about the dearth or shortcomings of British intellectuals have also played out in other national contexts. The similarity of Italian and English laments about the perceived inadequacies of each nation's intellectuals ‘surely indicates a shared structural logic rather than a uniquely national condition’ (p. 216). These chapters illustrate at once Collini's arguments about the logic of the role of the intellectual and the claim that there is no national norm against which other societies' intelligentsias should be assessed. In effect, these comparative studies take as their text one of the premises of E. P. Thompson's ‘The peculiarities of the English’: ‘It happened in one way in France, in another way in England. I am not disputing the importance of the difference – and of the different traditions which ensued – but the notion of typicality.’ Collini quotes these sentences in a discussion of the debate over the ‘Nairn-Anderson thesis’ of a British Sonderweg, and then returns to it at the end of the chapter on France: ‘[m]ore extended reflection’ on the French tradition, he writes, ‘surely drives one back’ to Thompson's remark (pp. 172–5, 274–5).

The analytical power of Collini's argument is such that it can do justice to temporal and national specificities and a transnational ‘structural logic’ at the same time. The ability to conjure logic and texture is also evident in the treatment of the BBC's ‘highbrow’ Third Programme. Collini brings out the Third Programme's distinctive character, but discriminates between it and the cultural space it occupied, the space between specialism and a mass audience (‘a space naturally adapted to raising the question of intellectuals precisely because movement to and fro across that space constituted the role in question’ (p. 188)). To confuse changes in particular institutions with changes in the cultural spaces they occupy – seeing in the decline of a particular kind of periodical, or the retrenchment of the Third Programme, the break-up of ‘the public sphere’ – is, as Collini says, a signature error of cultural pessimists. Threaded through the discussions of the BBC, Taylor and Ayer, the manifestoes and studies of intellectuals issued in the 1950s, and the ill-advised coronation of Colin Wilson is a perceptive interpretation of ‘the dynamics of cultural authority in 1950s Britain’: a moment when the Third Programme, television, the Sunday papers, and changes in secondary education made for a greatly expanded audience for intellectuals; a moment both of cultural democratization and of persistent ‘cultural deference’ that was ‘hard to disentangle from forms of social deference’ (esp. pp. 399, 421). While Absent minds is avowedly not ‘a general history of “intellectual life in twentieth-century Britain”’ (p. 7), in practice there is a partial – and immensely insightful – version of such a history dispersed through the book and ancillary to its exploration of the question of intellectuals.

Collini has complained elsewhere about the slack way reviewers use the word ‘magisterial’. It was predictable that Absent minds would itself be described that way: it is a work of great learning, authority and substance. But it is also one that describes a pair of radio discussions, one by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf and the other by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, as ‘eavesdropping on high-end pillow-talk’ (p. 113). This is a book in which playfulness and wit interlock with, rather than adorn or relieve, probing analysis and humane seriousness.