This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The educational dominance of an otherworldly, fossilised and socially exclusive Oxbridge,” writes Colin Kidd, was “a central trope in the British literature of decline” that came to prominence in the late 1950s. Even today, we can see echoes in the two divergent, almost contradictory images of Oxbridge in popular culture. One depicts our “fossilised” ancient universities as full of shambling unworldly inadequates interested in things no one else could possibly care about, though in crime fiction seething with murderous intramural resentments.
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The alternative sees them as not unworldly at all but as ruthless “socially exclusive” machines designed to ensure that the same sort of people stay on top. We can find this, for example, in polemical books such as Simon Kuper’s Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK (2022) and in the many dramas which foreground the kind of entitled misbehaviour associated with the Bullingdon Club.
Kidd’s new book offers us a much richer and more subtle picture of what he calls a lost “golden age”. The central argument can be easily stated. Some dons were “at the very core of the war machine”. Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford professor of physics, became one of Churchill’s favoured protégés. Edgar “Bill” Williams, a junior research fellow in 18th century history, was asked by Montgomery to take charge of “the intelligence side of planning for the Battle of El Alamein”.
There was therefore widespread “recognition that donnish brainpower — whether embodied in scientific experts, staff office strategists or economists tasked with Lend-Lease negotiations — had played a significant part in winning the war”.
This in turn created “an unusual buoyancy in the academic elite, a confidence that as men (and sometimes women) of the world they could participate beyond the academy as intellectual, aesthetic and ethical leaders of the life of the nation”. Eventually, however, they were “knocked off their perch” by the student protests of the 1960s and then the Thatcherite assault on universities’ funding and independence.
So, contrary to popular preconceptions before, during and after the period Kidd examines, his dons were not at all unworldly. But the experience of fighting together for a noble cause under a coalition government broke down some of the sharp political divisions of the 1930s and tended to reconcile even radicals to an establishment which had once seemed so faulty. Hence the emergence of “a body of intellectuals which, far from constituting an intelligentsia of the continental type, was profoundly integrated into the fabric of English society and its established institutions”.
A chapter on Oxbridge’s often ambivalent relations with the US illustrates how “the views of Oxford dons mattered” well beyond the seminar room. In the aftermath of JFK’s assassination in 1963 and the release of the official Warren Report a year later, Kidd tells us, scepticism about whether Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone was largely confined in the US to “the maverick margins of left-wing culture”.
But many British intellectuals were unconvinced, and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a highly critical article about the report in the Sunday Times. The following week, John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls — who “belonged to the same small Oxford dining club” — wrote a savage response accusing his friend’s article of being “marred by bias and blotted with inaccuracies”. The spat attracted much media interest, though behind the scenes the antagonists expressed more nuanced views and Sparrow wrote to Trevor-Roper hoping that they could still “remain friends”.
Kidd makes two points about this episode. It was the involvement of Trevor-Roper in particular, he claims, that “brought doubts about the orthodox interpretation of Kennedy’s assassination into the mainstream of American cultural life”. It also reveals how “a shared donnish collegiality” could “trump fiercely expressed divisions on matters of public controversy”.
One particular area of cosy collegiality was around religion. What Kidd calls “Anglican agnosticism” was to be found both in “a growing and visible minority of college deans and chaplains, whose creed was minimal, who openly questioned conventional pieties and who were beset by doubts” and in the many “unobtrusively unbelieving dons” who never objected to college chapels or choral evensong.
As a result, Kidd says, it was “dogmatic Catholicism” that “provided the sharpest alternative to the glib, easygoing worldly conformity of postwar Oxbridge”. When Robert Zaehner gave his inaugural lecture as Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, he savaged the goals of the Spalding bequest — to “bring together the world’s great religions in closer understanding, harmony and fellowship” — as “damnable”.
Similarly, it was Elizabeth Anscombe — not only a Catholic but a female outsider, “aggressively masculine in dress” — who challenged the standard view of World War II and launched a solo campaign against Oxford’s decision to give an honorary degree to former American president Harry Truman on the ground that he had authorised the dropping of two atom bombs.
Oxbridge was long sniffy about sociology as a disciple, but Kidd’s chapter on “Anglo-French exasperation”, subtitled “Lévi-Strauss’s English apostates”, describes something of an unhappy love affair with social anthropology. Both Rodney Needham at Merton College, Oxford, and Edmund Leach at King’s College, Cambridge, “found themselves caught up in the spell of France’s foremost anthropological pioneer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose insights they sought to disseminate more widely to the anglophone world during the 1960s”.
Another Oxford scholar, Sybil Wolfram, was asked by Lévi-Strauss to translate La pensée sauvage into English. Though Kidd acknowledges that all four of the key players were “abrasive, angular and difficult”, Lévi-Strauss proved exceptionally high-handed and irritable with his translators and acolytes. He even included in the second edition of The Elementary Structures of Kinship an “offensive dismissal” of Needham.
Both Needham and Leach came to distrust what they saw as Lévi-Strauss’s “cavalier disregard about accuracy” and “prima-donna-like reaction to any criticism”. The former even came to the view that “Lévi-Strauss was a fraud and was determined to find ever more outrageous ways of saying this”.
Though Oxbridge student protests were noticeably less dramatic than those in the US and France and were applauded by a few radical professors, Kidd argues that they generally proved disturbing for the “dons at the receiving end and shook their corporate self-confidence”.
Yet, as Max Beloff, then Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls, commented at the time, there was something “contradictory” in “demands for reforming Oxford’s anachronistic curriculum and for wider openness in undergraduate admissions”, as if people were saying: “Oxford is terrible — why can’t everyone go there?”
It is well known that most academics were very hostile to Margaret Thatcher, but Kidd explores how she attracted a cautious welcome from both “an unusual strain of hard Right conservatism associated in particular with Cambridge’s oldest college, Peterhouse” and a number of “disillusioned Whig-liberal grandees” dismayed by educational trends who “never completed the full journey to a Thatcherite destination”, not least because tighter control on government expenditure tended to “undercut donnish authority”.
Though many dons “remained as lively, ambitious and ingenious as ever,” Kidd concludes, there was a collective “shrivelling of self-confidence, a narrowing of opinions, a waning of élan.”
Though qualities such as “buoyancy” and “élan” are difficult to quantify, this broad analysis seems very plausible and the detail is consistently entertaining. Yet many of the issues and debates he touches on still seem very active, and I wish Kidd had said a little more about the relevance of his history to the present day.
When I was once researching an article about the conflict between science and religion in universities, I remember asking the then chaplain of New College, Oxford what she felt about Richard Dawkins. She said that they were on perfectly good terms and that she shared some of his criticisms of religion. Even writing a book such as The God Delusion, which claims that religious belief is simple-minded and tantamount to child abuse, apparently, doesn’t prevent you from being a “good chap” in the eyes of some clerics.
So we still seem to be living in a world where a “minimal creed” is required for some religious positions and where “shared donnish collegiality” can paper over fundamental disagreements. One can argue whether this shows an admirable commitment to civilised discussion or a basic lack of seriousness about ideas.
