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“... was already a philosophical outsider. While still at school he fell under the spell of R.G. Collingwood, who lambasted contemporary philosophers for lacking any sense of history. Collingwood illustrated his point with a tale about a scholar who insisted on translating the Greek word τριήρης as ...”

“... notion of discontinuity’. The philosophy of history has certainly changed since the days of R.G. Collingwood, to whom the comparison between historians and detectives still seemed perfectly appropriate. Whether these developments will ultimately produce a more sophisticated understanding of the French Revolution, or only fuel the production of unintelligible ...”

“... from his review of Eliot’s A Choice of Kipling’s Verse: ‘Art, as the late Professor R.G. Collingwood pointed out, is not Magic, i.e. a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is ...”

“... to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank ...”

“... in the Thirties, that a Life contain only the barest personal details. He stands with R.G. Collingwood, the author of a robustly unforthcoming autobiography, in wanting the story of his life to be the record of his thought; no Nietzschean nonsense in this case of the life merging with the oeuvre to make an enthralling whole. Bergson, unlike ...”

“... was with mock ruefulness that he noted a possible parallel between his own career and that of R.G. Collingwood, who was ‘praised as a philosopher by historians and as a historian by philosophers’. Several of his students and admirers responded to Gellner’s disregard for academic pigeonholing: ‘It was from Ernest that I learned not to give a damn about ...”

“... it? History, like myth, varies, but the two genres of narrative have different limits. Even R.G. Collingwood admitted that, though you can indeed tell the story of Caesar’s assassination in various ways, there are ways in which you can’t tell it: you can’t say that Caesar killed Brutus. Myth, by contrast, can say that Marian killed Robin – or can ...”

“... of history. When they philosophised about the Enlightenment, in short, they were taking what R.G. Collingwood called the ‘closed’ approach to intellectual history. Things could only get better, and the first sign that they were doing so was Peter Gay’s magnificent study, The Enlightenment (1966). Not that Gay was unpartisan. He had fled the insanities ...”

“... approximately 0.025 per cent of this work, or even slightly less, as one of my entries (on R.G. Collingwood) was written jointly with the late Bernard Williams. At the time, I grumbled as much as everyone else about the labour involved in checking such details as place of burial and mother’s maiden name, tasks which were no doubt even more demanding if ...”