Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism
Apr 2026 · Princeton University Press
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The rise to power and eventual fall from grace of the Oxbridge intellectual
After World War II, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge—the dons—formed an unusual kind of university-based, establishment-connected intelligentsia. Unlike intellectuals in other countries, often antiestablishment 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 Britain’s Oxford- and Cambridge-based intellectual elites—and how their influence waned when Oxbridge’s 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 Britain’s most famous intellectuals—Elizabeth 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 toward America and France—as seen in their engagement in the debates over the Kennedy assassination and the awkward reception of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. When Oxbridge came under assault, it was first by a modernizing, technocratic Left in the early 1960s, then by student radicals in the late 1960s and finally by the Thatcherite right—in 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.
After World War II, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge—the dons—formed an unusual kind of university-based, establishment-connected intelligentsia. Unlike intellectuals in other countries, often antiestablishment 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 Britain’s Oxford- and Cambridge-based intellectual elites—and how their influence waned when Oxbridge’s 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 Britain’s most famous intellectuals—Elizabeth 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 toward America and France—as seen in their engagement in the debates over the Kennedy assassination and the awkward reception of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. When Oxbridge came under assault, it was first by a modernizing, technocratic Left in the early 1960s, then by student radicals in the late 1960s and finally by the Thatcherite right—in 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.
About the author
Colin Kidd is the Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He taught previously at the University of Glasgow and Queen’s University Belfast, and was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1987 to 1994 and again from 2005 to 2019. He is the author of The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain's Wars of Mythography and other books. He has been a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Guardian and The New Statesman.
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