Colin Kidd’s new history, “Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism” (Princeton University Press), argues that the Oxbridge professoriate enjoyed a golden age running from 1945 to Margaret Thatcher’s ascent in 1979. Reviewing it in the WSJ, Tunku Varadarajan sketches an era when dons were a national institution rather than a besieged one.
The golden age was built on what Kidd calls “soft power”:
- Kidd spent 21 years as an All Souls College fellow before moving to St Andrews — “the sort of place that might send a shudder down the fellowship at his former abode”
- Dons were TV personalities, royal tutors, and voices with the ear of cabinet ministers and press barons; they sat on royal commissions that shaped national policy
- Cambridge archaeologist Glyn Daniel was TV personality of the year in 1955; among his pupils was Prince Charles, who stayed a lifelong confidant and patron
- Time magazine in 1961 called All Souls a sanctum sanctorum “where the best brains of Oxford are preserved — in alcohol”
Kidd’s own verdict on the era, quoted in the review, is anything but sentimental: “A complacent lowercase conservatism coincided with greater access to the press, the radio and television, creating a new kind of complacency, one with a megaphone at its disposal.” Influence without accountability — the mandarinate’s soft power was real but never democratic.
The review opens in the present to measure the fall. After the tragic Jason Arday affair — the Cambridge professor who died by suicide following press revelations of plagiarism — the idea of a don as national celebrity feels archaic. The book’s endpoint, Thatcherism, is the premiership that closed the golden age.
The underlying subject is the rise and fall of an intellectual Establishment: how elite academic authority is won, exercised, and dismantled. Whether its passing marked the end of a national treasure or the end of an unaccountable elite is exactly the argument the book invites.