The rise to power and eventual fall from grace of the Oxbridge intellectual
After World War II, the academics of Oxford and Cambridgethe donsformed an unusual kind of university-based, establishment-connected intelligentsia. Unlike intellectuals in other countries, often anti-establishment outsiders, the dons of Oxbridge enjoyed secure and even cosy connections with those in power. In Twilight of the Dons, Colin Kidd examines the golden age of Britains Oxford- and Cambridge-based intellectual elitesand how their influence waned when Oxbridges links to the establishment began to fray. Kidd explores a series of episodes and themes that range from the dons confrontations with student protesters in the 1960s to their reaction to the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The cast of characters includes many of twentieth-century Britains most famous intellectualsElizabeth Anscombe, Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Leach, J. H. Plumb and Hugh Trevor-Roper, to name just a few.
Kidd describes the multiple important roles played by dons in World War II, the countercultural force of convert Catholicism and the strange phenomenon of Tory Marxism. He examines the dons attitudes towards America and Franceas seen in their engagement in the debates over the Kennedy assassination and the awkward reception of Lévi-Strausss anthropology. When Oxbridge came under assault, it was first by a modernising, technocratic Left in the early 1960s, then by student radicals in the late 1960s and finally by the Thatcherite Rightin whose rise, Kidd shows, some dons were complicit. As deference to Oxbridge intelligentsia declined, a reassessment of the place of dons in British public life began.
