Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. ‘He knew all about cheeses, wisteria, Rubens’s brushwork, herbaceous borders, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird-life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibniz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles, 17th-century military strategy, breeds of North African dog, the vowel-sounds of Afrikaans, the vegetation of the Minho valley.’ But ‘he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster’ and his comments on English literature, the subject he was ostensibly responsible for teaching, ‘seemed the kind of thing that Princess Margaret might say’.

Eagleton was probably a little unfair to Theodore Redpath, the polymathic model for this caricature. Although the playwright Simon Gray also thought him insipid, others disagreed. Gazing at Redpath over coffee, Sylvia Plath was so attracted by his ‘rich, chastened, wide mind’ that she ‘practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father’. But Eagleton was not wholly wrong about some of the people to be found working at Oxford and Cambridge in the middle decades of the 20th century. In St John’s College, Oxford, for instance, law was taught for forty years by a failed philosophy don who got up the subject almost overnight when it became clear he had no future as a philosopher (and, thus, no future as a don). Edwin Slade’s proud boast was that not a single undergraduate he taught ever got a first-class degree, and his main contribution to scholarship was a set of exacting rules on the order in which fruit should be circulated after dinner. The life of the mind, this was not.

There are three predominant modes of writing about universities and the people who work within them. One is Whiggish: taking today’s values as the goal towards which the arc of history was always intending to bend, it delineates a rise in standards over time. Another, increasingly popular in the glossy pseudo-­histories produced by many institutions, celebrates a sort of stasis, with the identity of the university fixed at its foundation and then perpetuated to the present day. The third and most common mode is the recessional: a threnody for the vanished greatness of an earlier period.

That sense of loss is especially apparent in works written by those recollecting the immediate past. It is evident, for instance, in the otherwise radical William Tuckwell’s nostalgic account of early Victorian Oxford, with its celebration of the ‘characters’ who apparently abounded in the unreformed university as well as the quality of their discourse. In the 1830s, ‘conversation was a fine art, a claim to social distinction’, he writes. ‘Their talk ranged wide; their scholarship was not technical but monumental.’ By the 1840s, Tuckwell bemoans, ‘characters were becoming rare’ and the fine art of talking was under threat.

As his title suggests, Colin Kidd’s deeply researched and insightful new book cleaves more closely to the declinist track than it does to either of the other two modes. It describes a few decades, from around 1950 to about 1980, ‘when the dons enjoyed high prestige, freedom and confidence’ and then narrates the great collapse of the Thatcher years, which left behind ‘a shrivelling of self-confidence, a narrowing of options, a waning of élan’. Just like Tuckwell, Kidd celebrates an age of ample, open, erudite conversation, while also implying that discussions around the high tables of Oxford and Cambridge are today somewhat subpar.

Still more, of course, this account resembles a book written by a key member of the generation Kidd describes: Noel Annan’s Our Age, published in 1990. Annan was indeed almost the beau idéal of the sort of Oxbridge figure that The Twilight of the Dons addresses. He was highly intelligent, well connected, with a good war behind him and an impressive ability to move between university and public life, broadcasting and reviewing along the way. In his book, Annan offered a study of dozens of similarly successful contemporaries. Like Our Age, too, Kidd’s account is both a general history and a collection of stand-alone essays.

But while Annan clearly thought that the dons rather deserved their drubbing by Thatcher, Kidd is keener to defend the golden age he describes. More than this, he sees the assaults of the 1980s as intensely damaging not only to Oxbridge, but to British culture more generally. ‘From starting as national flagships with deeply felt responsibilities towards the wider fleet,’ he concludes, ‘Oxford and Cambridge turned into luxury cruise liners, which increasingly served an international clientele.’ Dethroning the dons from their role as ‘the nation’s higher conscience’, meanwhile, left a vacuum which, in his analysis, has never been filled.

Kidd is one of our most brilliant intellectual historians and this book displays all his characteristic qualities: depth of research, command of argument and a seemingly effortless ability to distil complex ideas into stylish prose. Both his general analysis of postwar Oxbridge and the individual essays on particular themes are outstanding works of history as well as a delight to read. Nonetheless, some questions remain about the project and the conclusions that Kidd comes to.

Not least, there is the question of scope. Kidd’s compass is wide, but it is not all-embracing. By focusing on the big names in the two ancient universities, he ignores a far larger group of also-rans. For every member of what he terms the ‘secular clerisy’, there must have been at least three or four good college men who didn’t serve on royal commissions but spent their evenings hectoring the junior fellows about when and how to pass the cherries around the common room. Nor did Oxbridge have a complete monopoly on high thinking or public service. Manchester was surely the most influential English university for the study of history in this period, while the ambitious Asa Briggs abandoned sleepy Oxford for more dynamic Leeds.

One might wonder, too, about whether decline is the best way of describing a process of change. There are perhaps fewer high-profile academics today than there were in the 1950s, but the cultural reach of dons as a whole was arguably never that great. Certainly, the disputes explored here – whether about the advent of sociology in the university or the importance of Claude Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist – were scarcely front-page news. In 2020, the Oxford Covid vaccine was, however; and the Cambridge theologian James Orr’s role in Reform UK demonstrates the continued investment of at least some dons in political life.

Indeed, Kidd’s sense that the postwar generation was possessed of a more ‘confident worldliness’ than the cramped, professionalised academics of the present is curious. True enough, the Oxbridge academics of 2026 are less likely to have attended an English public school, but many are every bit as worldly as their rather grander predecessors. It might quite reasonably be argued that dons usually are. ‘Far from being separated from the currents of ordinary life,’ the academic administrator John Carswell once observed, universities are almost shamefully quick in their response to any variation in external conditions. In the postwar period, this responsiveness meant that Kidd’s dons flocked to the institutions of the state and sought to harness the influence of the BBC. Now, it means they spin out companies and launch podcasts. In thirty years, our twilight may seem another golden age.