Colin Kidd - Twilight of the Dons...with TRE's Giles Brown

Kidd describes the multiple important roles played by dons in World War II, the countercultural force of convert Catholicism and the strange phenomenon of Tory Marxism. He examines the dons’ attitudes towards America and France―as seen in their engagement in the debates over the Kennedy assassination and the awkward reception of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. When Oxbridge came under assault, it was first by a modernising, technocratic Left in the early 1960s, then by student radicals in the late 1960s and finally by the Thatcherite Right―in whose rise, Kidd shows, some dons were complicit. As deference to Oxbridge intelligentsia declined, a reassessment of the place of dons in British public life began.Catch Giles live - 'Let's Talk' - Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday - from 10.00CET...on tre.radio