Stefan Collini

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.

Not everyone​ has a chimpanzee named after them. When the primate ethologist Jane Goodall called one of the troop she studied in Tanzania ‘Huxley’, it was an affectionate tribute to her colleague Julian Huxley, distinguished biologist and prominent popular science writer. But observers (and perhaps other chimps) could be forgiven for thinking it was a reference to Thomas...

Attitudes​ to the BBC are, for the most part, spirit-sappingly predictable. Politicians of all parties believe it is biased against them. One powerful lobby claims it is a hotbed of radicals bent on undermining national identity, another that it is the mouthpiece of the establishment. Some critics denounce the licence fee as insulating the BBC against the bracing winds of competition, while others complain that the corporation has already abandoned its public service remit in the search for profit. One chorus takes up the theme that programming remains ‘elitist’ and ‘middle class’, another that it has become demotic and debased. Many people seem to feel that so long as The Archers and the shipping forecast are left untouched, then all is right with the world; others seem to think that the problem is precisely that The Archers and the shipping forecast have been left untouched for too long. It’s not easy to come up with any really new complaints about the BBC. Faced with this repetitive litany of charge and countercharge, what contribution can historians make?

It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about. In his day (a day that, unfortunately for him, ended a decade or so before his death in 1946, a month short of his 80th birthday), H.G. Wells was one of the world’s leading literary and intellectual celebrities. Hailed as ‘a man of genius’ on the appearance of his breakthrough book, The Time Machine...