Features September 2005
British intellectual life today
Britain Today: Part II
About a century ago, the term “man of letters” was in Britain replaced by “intellectual.” Daniel Johnson examines the difference between the two, and what that difference says about the state of the life of the (British) mind.
French intellectuals are often vain; German intellectuals are notoriously obscure; British intellectuals are merely embarrassed. But are they embarrassed to be British, or embarrassed to call themselves intellectuals? Unlike other Europeans or, for that matter, Americans, the British have traditionally tended to be self-deprecating about intelligence. The habit of nicknames reflects a society in which highbrows know their place, and that place is to be eccentric, or marginal to public life. Academics are faintly comical dons, scientists are boffins; they live in ivory towers or are cloistered, and all are too clever by half. Unless, of course, they are foreigners, who are allowed, indeed expected, to be intellectuals. For the concept of the intellectual still sounds vaguely foreign, even suspect, to British ears. It was a suspicion that W. H. Auden ridiculed in a famous...
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