Readers of the London Review of Books will know from Stefan Collini's sharp and elegant contributions there and elsewhere that any book of his will argue a case and not merely present a description or a synthesis. This new study of the intellectual question in British cultural life does precisely that. From the first page it is evident that this long, perhaps over-long, book will press a case and subordinate other concerns to its effective marshaling. What Collini wants to achieve is not a history of British intellectuals but rather to raise the problem of talking about “intellectuals” at all in the British context. Discussion of the status, content, and desirability of the intellectual life has been dogged in Britain, the author contends, by a protracted and misguided tradition, one dominated by cliché and an unthinking exceptionalism. Other countries have intellectuals: the British have more sense. Collini sees his task as one of blowing away such cobwebs and asserting, in an argument of great richness and penetration, that Britain has produced quite as many significant intellectuals as any other country, that comparative perspectives reveal not the poverty of British experience but a continuum of experience across Western cultures, that modern intellectuals have at least as much of a role in British society as that asserted on behalf of the French or recalled in Golden Age jeremiads, and that the failure to see these things originates not in “reality” (somehow defined) but rather in distorting forms of cultural pessimism. His Minds are therefore not Absent at all: he wants to put them back or rather insist that they never left.

To build this ambitious edifice Collini erects a good deal of scaffolding—so much of it in the first seventy pages, indeed, that one wonders when the fabric will begin to take shape. But he has to show, in a sort of distended entry for the Oxford English Dictionary, how the word “intellectual” has functioned in modern English discourse. This gives him four topoi around which to analyze his discussion: the intellectual as a particular kind of achiever; the thinker who can reach publics other than his or her “own”; the person able to tune into general or abstract concerns of those publics; the possessor of “reputation” who uses available media to announce a message. Having retrieved his definitions from ordinary-language usage, Collini then tests against them conventional hypotheses of spatial and temporal exceptionalism by examining intellectuals elsewhere and taking the reader through a series of British intellectuals who are taken to be emblematic of some of the relationships he wants to silhouette. Collini wants to say—his most original point—that talk of intellectuals turns on implicit relationships within a culture and not on essential and defining characteristics of an intelligentsia. And those relationships are often predicated on persistent tensions between implicit binary oppositions—we hear a lot about “unsteadiness”—in accounts of British intellectuals that slide from one meaning (or innuendo) to another. Beginning temporally with the Dreyfus affair, which gave the world his word and the author his best phrase, “Dreyfus-envy” (5), Collini marches about the twentieth century but sits down most often on a section of time between 1930 and 1960 where he finds many of the conventionalities he wants to attack most consistently conceived and expressed. Spatially he goes mostly to France, which he knows well, and America, about which he sounds less confident. He makes a day trip to Germany, manages an afternoon in Italy, and puts through a single long-distance call to Russia. But then, he is not interested in carrying out a systematic comparative study any more than he is concerned about all those intellectuals that his book does not mention. His job is to get the question right. Others will come along with pieces of the answer.

All of this makes for a certain cheerfulness. British intellectuals, and Collini often seems to be thinking of academics like himself, may work in concrete bunkers and wither under the weight of academic administration and audit, but they should throw off despair and see the world as it is—a niche in British society from which they have many avenues for intellectual expression and opportunity galore to make a difference. Three hesitations mar this happiness. Those intellectuals who reinforce Collini's worldview fare far better than those, like T. S. Eliot, who do not, and there are noticeable moments of unevenness in the treatment of his major players. Many readers may form the view, second and relatedly, that Collini sees cultural pessimism—a major target—as not only contestable or socially regressive but as unintelligent, and the most passive among us becomes a little weary of being thought ignorant, stupid, arch, slack (a favorite), or, more obscurely, willful, the dominant adjective of the second half of the book. The third hesitation is more fundamental and arises from a disturbing sense of epistemological naïveté. Collini, like so many secular progressives, thinks he can see the world as it is in some unvarnished way and rejoices that this clarity offers “an infinitely better starting-point for thinking about improvement than the traditional mixture of prejudice and fantasy” (505). That proposition will stand more reflection than is possible in a short review, but its arresting baldness is enough to give one pause and ask a question about the strong undertow of persuasion felt throughout the book. Having paused, however, the reader should “surely” (another Collini word) move on, see his book in the round, and agree that Collini has highlighted a question of signal importance in modern culture, one of special interest to all interested in revising the history and sociology of Britain's intellectuals.