The culture wars proceed apace—or do they? To talk about fighting a war is in some respects a cheering metaphor; it presupposes at least the possibility of victory. But there are days when one feels that the whole thing is really over, and that all that is left are the mopping-up operations.

There was the recent gray dawn, for instance, when the government issued its latest decrees for the teaching of literature in schools. And here I must pause: the idea that it would have been issuing any decrees at all in such a field would have seemed so bizarre in the Britain of twenty or thirty years ago that it calls for an explanation.

Once upon a time the British prided themselves on having a school system which avoided heavy centralization and state control. In those days the question of which authors were taught in schools would have been largely decided by the schools themselves or by local examination boards, which often received guidance from ...

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