If Oxford were to fail to stay in that league I do not think that any other British university would do so. It is now the biggest British university except for the federated ones of London and Wales. While more may not be worse, bigness is clearly not in itself excellence, but it is nevertheless remarkable that Oxford, which pre-war was barely two-thirds the size of Cambridge, should now be marginally bigger. It is largely the result of the grafting on of what is virtually a new scientific university in the past fifty years. I do not think that any other European university would do so either, in spite of the ancient fame of Bologna, or the central intellectual position of Paris, or the traditional teutonic authority of Heidelberg, Göttingen or Tübingen: maybe Tokyo, maybe Toronto, maybe more doubtfully Sydney might compete, but if Oxford were to withdraw I doubt if there would be anywhere outside the United States that could claim to be in the first six or eight. I think that would be bad not merely for Oxford, but for Britain and indeed for the whole world balance.
I am therefore a resolute fund-raiser. But I am not a wholly joyous one for three reasons: it over-elevates the position of the rich. They have been far more courted and cultivated - this is no doubt part of the purpose of the enterprise - in Thatcherite Britain than they were in Churchillian or Wilsonite or Heathite Britain. There is also a danger of making universities and colleges too money-centred with fund-raising ability too much of a qualification for appointment to high academic office. There is the additional danger that it may reverse the highly desirable trend towards competing and more dispersed poles of excellence which I noted earlier. Ths concept of making universities more dependent on private fund-raising is certainly not a radical or an iconoclastic one. It is a deeply conservative (with a small 'c') one for it underpins the existing hierarchy. The competitive ability of universities and/or colleges to raise money from their alumni is an almost direct function of the rich undergraduate-attracting status of the various institutions a generation or two ago.
I therefore have no doubt about my duty in relation to fund-raising as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But I have a certain amount of general caution, I do not want ‘the idea of a university’, to use Cardinal John Henry Newman’s famous phrase, to become that of locating the nearest potential benefactor and squeezing him until the pips squeak.
A Selection of Political Biographies
A Daily Telegraph article of 1988.
Good Biography as a general rule dates much more quickly than does good fiction. Perhaps this is simply because it is a lower art form, and therefore, like perfectly decent but undistinguished wine, suffers rather than benefits from age.
In any event I am convinced that it is so. No one who has ever liked Dickens or Dostoevsky, Jane Austen or George Eliot is likely to find them dated on a return visit. Yet the general run of good-quality pre-1914 biography is not much read or appreciated today. Maybe the highest peaks survive intact. In this category of outstanding Victorian biography there would, I suppose, be strong support for Froude’s Carlyle, G. O. Trevelyan’s Macaulay and Morley’s Gladstone. Yet I do not think that either Trevelyan or Froude survive as well as the subjects’ own non-biographical writing, and Morley’s smooth-flowing three-volume narrative does not capture the Grand Old Man’s massive inner turbulence, which made him so quintessential a figure of his age, nearly as well as do Gladstone’s own Diaries.
If we step down a rank, however, which means that we are still dealing with works that were greeted as highly competent and comprehensive portraits when they appeared, we are into a pace and style of treatment that seems as remote today as a hansom cab in a pea soup fog. When over forty years ago I first read books like A. G. Gardiner’s Sir William Harcourt and J. A. Spender’s Campbell-Bannerman I found them useful and enjoyable. Now, however, I would much rather re-read a chapter (in the course of looking up an incident) in the present Lord Moran’s C.B. (1973) just as I prefer Robert Blake’s Disraeli to Moneypenny and Buckle’s six volumes. On Harcourt, who was an engaging and rumbustious figure sometimes known as ‘the great gladiator’, there is nothing much to switch to, which makes him one of the rare undeveloped sites available to a young biographer in the overcrowded world of today.
Despite the Disraeli example the difference is not just a question of length. It is much more one of angle of view. The old tombstone lives, in Lytton Strachey’s words ‘those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’, mostly unrolled the career of the commemorated one with political respect and personal discretion. An occasional short chapter on his literary taste or country pursuits was about the nearest one got to inquisitive dissection of character. It is as impossible to imagine Alistair Home’s Macmillan being published fifty or sixty years ago, as it would be to imagine the Life of Sir Michael Hicks Beach by his daughter being published today.