I begin with an outline of the book. A biography of Highet is followed by one chapter on his teaching and another consisting of ‘reviews’ of Highet's most significant monographs. There are a number of appendices – a mixed bag of documents and literary pieces by Highet. Some of these are gems: reading a reference from 1931 (in this case, Cyril Bailey's letter recommending Highet to the Tutorial Fellowship at St John's College, Oxford) is an intensely amusing experience for anyone who must read or write (or request) modern references. There follows a bibliography of works cited (in an unorthodox move, documentary and published material are cited together); of works by Highet to be added to an earlier bibliography; and, perhaps most helpfully, of works about Highet. Some rather charming photos of Highet and his family – at work, at home – are strewn about the book.

There is an old-fashioned quality to the career of Highet (1906–1978), despite its unusual features: the move from a tutorial fellowship at Oxford to the US; the journalism and popular writing; and a view of literature that holds ancient and modern works to be strictly inseparable. That breadth is perhaps the most striking characteristic of Highet's work as a whole: demands for specialisation have made careers like his all but unreachable for most people nowadays. In that sense, this book – a ‘retrospect’ – is worth contemplating: do we have, should we have, an academy with space for new Highets to flourish? Highet's mentor, Maurice Bowra (1898–1971), on whom see most recently L. Mitchell (2009), is a close parallel in his breadth both of audience and intellectual interest; we might have been treated to more reflection on Bowra's influence (there is an interesting hint in n. 30 quoting a letter of Isaiah Berlin referring to Bowra's ‘softness about Highet’). Bowra (quoted at n. 113, a fascinating passage on the Oxford context) wrote in a letter that W.S. Barrett was ‘Fraenkel's best (and only) pupil and has all the marks of the beast’ – one wonders if the same could with equal justice (and intemperance: Barrett was far from Fraenkel's only pupil) be said of Highet and Bowra.

Still, the notion of a ‘retrospect’ on Highet is strange, particularly from the pen of B., who has done more than anyone to keep Highet's flame alight (Classical Papers [1983]; Unpublished Lectures [1998]; Classical Outlook 71 [1994], 80–1; CW 98 [2004], 30–60; CW 101 [2008], 504–31; Vergilius 66 [2020], 135–62). Chapter 1 is in essence a revised version of the biography in Classical Papers (pp. 1–11); the more copious apparatus of footnotes provides some useful prosopography. It could thus justly be argued that we did not need a ‘retrospect’ from the same source; one might even say that we learn less about Highet's place in the history of scholarship than we do indirectly about his obviously beguiling effect on his pupils. In view of the list of papers about Highet and of the ‘testimonials’ of students (Appendix F, pp. 71–6), including some highly distinguished Classicists, we might have been treated to a team effort (along the lines, for instance, of C. Stray, C. Pelling & S.J. Harrison [edd.], Rediscovering E.R. Dodds [2019], not to mention Stray's other projects). B. might then have encouraged a plurality of voices, rather than giving us more of what we already knew. It would be interesting to hear, for example, from a historian of journalism (do such exist?), on how Highet's career fits against his contemporary context (for an instructive parallel, see M. Beard, ‘Finley's journalism’, in D. Jew, R. Osborne & M. Scott [edd.], M. I. Finley [2016]).

The back of the book promises a career that was ‘both extraordinary and controversial’. It is not hard to think of scholars who have ignited fiercer controversy than Highet. Nonetheless, on turning to the ‘reviews’ chapter, augmented by long footnotes documenting references to Highet's work in subsequent scholarship, we discover that this refers to Juvenal the Satirist (1954), ‘Highet's most controversial book’ (p. 36; ‘most famous and disliked of Highet's books’, G.B. Townend, G&R 31 [1984], 204). We are treated to a full overview of the ‘persona debate’: this is a very useful guide to Juvenal scholarship. But in n. 117 we learn that praise of Highet is ‘typical’ – only adulatory reviews are permitted. This is a key failing of the Retrospect, that the main goal appears to be laudation of Highet to the exclusion of all else. There is no doubt that Juvenal the Satirist is one of the greatest works of biographical criticism; the problem is whether biographical criticism is what we want to read, or do. That problem has a much wider history – compare the complex relationship of M.L. West (on Hesiod) and U. Wilamowitz (on Plato and Hesiod) to biographical interpretation (West, Works and Days [1978], p. vi with n. 1 vs. 33–6). Juvenal (or the Roman elegists or Aristophanes or Pindar) plainly furnishes us with certain kinds of historical and social information; are these to be excluded along with biography? For B., to criticise Highet's biographical approach is simply to remain silent about Juvenal the Satirist's other virtues (p. 37 n. 199). A chapter in a book of papers devoted to different aspects of Highet's work might have been able to give a more balanced assessment, putting the book into the context of these wider historical trends; B. offers us a rather defensive account, in which Highet is only grudgingly permitted a mis-step.

The hagiographic tone is a theme of the book as a whole. Highet's publication list is always ‘long and impressive’ (pp. 1, 33); Highet's career ‘started to streak through the sky like a blazing comet’ (p. 10); the account of Highet's teaching is subtitled ‘pedagogical achievements’ (p. 17); n. 153 (pp. 48–9) introduces a series of books on Virgil that mention Highet, each with a laudatory epithet; Highet, Speeches in Vergil's Aeneid, is ‘definitive’ by dint of being the only study of its kind (p. 50 n. 157); B. describes his own work as ‘useful’ (p. 3). The only motives B. can imagine for criticising Highet are ‘elitist snobbery and an arrogance of expertise’ (pp. 13, 34) – no reasoned criticism? Some critical comments are marked with incredulous ‘[sic]’ (p. 20 n. 65). The saintly Highet would never denigrate a detractor (p. 54); on the other hand, his opposition (no doubt inspired by his mentor Bowra) to Dodds's lectures is not mentioned (see D.A. Russell, in: Rediscovering E.R. Dodds, p. 280). At pp. 21–3, W.M. Calder III's view that Highet was ‘jealous of the greater scholar’, namely Kurt von Fritz, is reviewed. The charges are (a) jealousy and (b) anti-German sentiment; they are rebuffed by assertions that Highet was never jealous of anybody, that his humane scholarship was something no German ever understood, and that, if he had anti-German sentiment, in spite of owning a Pauly-Wissowa (and, curiously, writing about a ‘young classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf’ [p. 23] – surely an error for someone more than 50 years his senior), this was because of his war service and knowledge of Nazi atrocities (see also p. 10). This will not do: Highet can have had thoughts to which B. was not privy (even thoughts he regretted) – no biographer has perfect access; he can also have thought about ‘Germans’ as a group differently to individuals (or even been able to distinguish ‘Germans’ from ‘Nazis’). The desire to exculpate Highet from anything close to a bad thought is not reasoned or balanced assessment.

Highet's work should not be forgotten. The problem is that works of adulation like this are likely to encourage the opposite response. A more balanced assessment of Highet's work would include situating books like The Classical Tradition (1949) amid contemporary debates about canonicity, ‘the West’ and whiteness; a history of (reactions to) biographical criticism; an account of ‘popular Classics’ in its various guises; the role of German and British émigrés in the American academy; Classic(ist)s and the Vietnam war, and a good deal besides. B.'s work will have pride of place in such a project for its rich documentary material, forming a link to Highet himself.