Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism, by Colin Kidd.
Focusing on the unworldly academic class of senior tutors and lecturers that haunted the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, Kidd writes that the dons were not simply “a set of quirky and eccentric individuals but collectively, structurally… an independent adversarial intelligentsia [and] something more akin to an estate of the realm.”
Kidd’s “minutely researched” book breaks new ground, The New Statesman wrote, demonstrating how the dons reached the zenith of their cultural and political influence in post-war England, before being scattered by “the shocks of student protests and Thatcherism.” Buy Twilight of the Dons from your local bookstore.