Stefan Collini

Have Britain​’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere. It is not easy to turn this suspicion into a...

By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from....

Atax system​ is a political philosophy expressed in numbers. Although the introduction of a tax can seem to be just a matter of brute politics, public acceptance of a new imposition is affected by the extent to which a justification can be provided. Elements of economic theory usually figure in the argument, but there are also widely held, albeit conflicting, moral intuitions to appeal to,...

Teachers want to engage the interests of students, while, for larger political reasons, people want to encounter individuals who are in some major dimension ‘like’ themselves – whether as political representatives, or teachers, or, more ambiguously, as authors. Yet one of the most important functions of an education in a humanities subject is to introduce students to worlds that are different from the one they think they know, and chronological and cultural distance are among the most important forms of such difference. In some cases this argument may involve retaining traditional and now unfashionable texts; in others it may justify ‘rebalancing’ a selection by including historically neglected authors or genres. Either way, the search for ‘identification’ – with a character, a story or a writer – may be an incitement to youthful reading, but a too-easy endorsement of this quest soon impoverishes a syllabus.