There is a poignant moment early in Asa Briggs's biography of his contemporary, Michael Young, when Briggs ventures to explain Young's inclusion in Noel Annan's Our Age: A Portrait of a Generation (1990). Annan, Briggs explains succinctly, “had got to know” Young in Cambridge (xi). (Young was a fellow of Churchill College for five years from 1961; Annan was provost of King's until 1966). Briggs himself does not loom large in Annan's book. He is named three times, but only in passing, first as an exemplar of the unsophisticated sociological orientations of many British historians (257); then as an author “challenging the metropolitan account of politics and culture and revealing the richness of urban and regional England” (272), illustrating the capacity of British historians to “absorb the lessons of German historiography while retaining the virtues of traditional British historiography”; and finally as an administrator at Sussex, demonstrating that many of “the best among Our Age left Oxbridge and Redbrick” for the new universities, escaping the “frustrations” of sclerotic governance, and experimenting with new models of teaching and learning (375).

The Age of Asa—a volume of essays that David Cannadine describes in a foreword as part intellectual biography, part “thank-offering” from his former students and colleagues, and part “birthday present” to “one of the towering figures of our time and our profession” (viii)—does a worthy job of writing Briggs into the prominent place he undoubtedly deserves in accounts of the “public life” of postwar Britain.

Edited by Miles Taylor, the volume is organized into three parts: history, broadcasting, and universities. Early chapters find Briggs amid the emergence of “history from below,” in the ferment of Victorian studies, in the development of interest in middle-class formation, and at the inception of labor history. Frank Bongiorno presents Briggs in Australia in 1960 acting as “a catalyst, a provocation and a reassurance” to innovators in the historical profession there (103). Late chapters describe Briggs's career as a “university impresario” and “philosopher-engineer,” redrawing the “map of learning” at Sussex to better reflect his own profound sense of “the interconnectedness of things,” and helping to found the Open University.

The middle section of the book—the most engaging, with thoughtful chapters by James Thompson, Jean Seaton, and Siân Nicholas—covers Briggs's career as historian of the BBC and his interests in “culture and communication” in historical context. Here we find evidence of the “busy practical afterlife” of Briggs's five-volume history of the national broadcaster, “thumbed over, rifled through, plundered and put to work by programme-makers and policy-formers up and down the place every day” (205), but also of Briggs's eventual alienation from the two academic specialties he helped to create, as evidenced by the Oxford University Press syndics' refusal (on reader advice) to publish his 1990 Ford Lectures, “Culture and Communication in Victorian England.”

Taylor's introduction recalls what Briggs later esteemed “the most stimulating experience on his life,” a year spent in Chicago on a Rockefeller foundation grant in 1952–53 (6). Reading David Riesman and Louis Wirth convinced Briggs that Lewis Mumford was wrong to remember the city life of the Victorians as “insensate.” Foremost among the avowed influences upon Briggs's formation as an historian was R. H. Tawney. But where Tawney had mainly seen “horrors” in the nineteenth century, Briggs discovered social vitality. Victorian Cities (1963) was instrumental in the postwar recreation of the nineteenth century as a moment of redemptive modernity. The Hammonds' “Bleak Age” was re-described by Briggs as the “Age of Improvement”; the nineteenth century was recreated as the precursor not of the “death of Liberal England” and depression between the wars but of postwar prosperity and the “progressive consensus” of the Wilson years. It is probably no coincidence that it is two of Briggs's admirers, Cannadine and Taylor, who have taken most notice of the profound reorientation in British historiography after 1950, which supplanted the seventeenth century with the nineteenth century in accounts of the “origins of modernity” (Miles Taylor, “The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?” [1997]; David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980” [1984]).

One senses that it was as historian, rather than as “philosopher-engineer” of university reform, that Briggs's career was most consequential. Annan liked his history medieval or early modern. Where contemporary, it should belong to the school of Machiavelli, or his later disciple Lewis Namier. Briggs's work did not fit the bill. Those two considerations may begin to explain why Annan took so little notice of Briggs in Our Age. But then this stimulating volume gives us Briggs in a kind of newspaper caricature, like that which adorns the book's jacket. For further explanation of Annan's indifference, and other interesting details—like the tension between Briggs and E. P. Thompson touched upon briefly in Malcom Chase's chapter here—we must await a full biographical portrait.