854 Reviews remains problematic. The consensus that novels such as Burmese Days and the (nevertheless hugely entertaining) Keep theAspidistra Flying areminor works is, in short, unlikely to be revoked at her behest. But shemakes a valiant stab at a new, and more equitable, assessment of them under thebanner of artistic import.As she concludes, 'this study ofOrwell's novelistic artistryhas attempted to correct hasty and unfair criticism' (p. 143). As such ithas been partially successful. Glasgow Julia Jordan Common Reading: Critics,Historians, Publics. By Stefan Collini. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. viii+368 pp. ?25. ISBN 978-0-19-929678-1. Stefan Collini's new collection of essays, following on his 2006 book, also for OUP, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (reviewed inMLR, 103 (2008), 504 05), approaches the subject of intellectuals inBritain via a reprinted series of review articles, usually for theTLS or LRB, ofmainly biographical books appearing recently on various writers of the twentieth century. Cyril Connolly, V. S. Pritchett,Huxley, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, Orwell, Spender, Empson, A. L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, Butterfield, E. H. Carr, E. P. Thompson, PerryAnderson, and Roger Scruton are all brought under review here. The second half of the book engages with more general essays on twentieth-century culture, though again the focus isbiographical, and the chapters were originally articles. In thefirsthalf, the intensityof engagement varies much; some of these figures aremuch slighter than others, and itshows in the review,while others are given a treatment that is too easy, as with Roger Scruton, whose England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) is reviewed: Collini dismisses it,probably rightly (though I have not read it),but the review isweakened first because Scruton represents more, intellectually, than just that book, and his other work on aesthetics and philosophy, which is obviously very Conservative in inclination, needs to be considered, and second, because the review pairs him with Kenneth Bakers Faber Book of Landscape Poetry (London: Faber, 2000), which is not thework of a critic, let alone intellectual, at all, but a calculated addendum to a political career. Some of thewriters chosen seem dated, and many call into question both theworth of the essayist's art that they practised and therefore, by implication, theworth of Collini's work on them; but some of the essays are very shrewd, e.g. those on Butterfield and Carr, where a novelist-like skill is atwork in reconstructing liveswhich seem both remote and puzzling, and itproduces results which are fascinating. Yet the undoubted and thorough skill in reading these personalities seems stronger than the analytic, and the ability to think abstractly about their ideas something I felt particularly with the comments on Thompson and Anderson. There, an attention to their style and to biographical detail prevents Collini from full engagement with theirpolitical thought. Since the book is somuch of a liberal perhaps-Left persuasion (at least one essay has been worked up from a Guardian piece; Simon Hoggart is cited for his humour), there lacks a sense of how much MLR, 104.3, 2009 855 those committed politics matter. It corresponds to an evasiveness which may relate to the present state of the Left in Britain; but it left me thinking three things: first that the provenance and direction of the journals which Collini has written for,the TLS in particular, need discussion; and what do they allow to be said and what consensual values do they require of the reviewer? Second, that the limitations of journalism associate with those of biography, a subject Collini raises (p. 284), but not sufficiently to critique either biography as a mode of understanding either a subject or subjectivity, or Collini's own usual method, which follows a biographical pattern, though in the name, often, of an intellectual history. Third, thatwhatever brilliance projects itself,the essays remain safe'; very Oxbridge-oriented (see page 291 on Brasenose for an instance) to the point of being gossipy, silly about cul tural studies ('that combination of sociology plus street cred', p. 270), and isolating Britain from Europe and America: an essay on Malraux and another onWilson do not free the reader from the thought that if many figures considered here seem dated and provincial, that...