Sphinx

Perhaps it was A.J.P. Taylor’s fault. Certainly, if he imagined a ‘public intellectual’, it was Taylor who came to mind – not because he’d ever actually experienced Taylor in that role, but an impressionable age he had read an obituary or tribute that stressed Taylor’s activities in taking academic history to a wider audience, and their consequences for his career. He had drawn from this two things, one more obviously erroneous than the other: firstly, that in any conflict between history as the exclusive preserve of an elite and history as something for everyone, the latter position was clearly noble and correct; secondly, that, having established one’s academic credentials, it was enough then to be willing to take these to a wider audience for the opportunities to do so to materialise. The possibilities that Taylor had energetically sought out such opportunities, and benefited from being enormously well connected and having the prestige of an Oxford position if never the Regius chair, or simply that times had changed and there was now no shortage of historians willing to take their work to a wider audience and pronounce on the issues of the day, genuinely had not occurred to him until much later.

It was not that the books he wrote didn’t sell; once or twice a year he was able to buy a nicer bottle of wine than usual, or cover unexpected household expenses without so much anxiety. But they didn’t sell remotely enough to compensate for the fact that they weren’t taken very seriously seriously as scholarly contributions. They were never noticed in the press, nor was he ever asked to write reviews except for specialist journals – let alone write articles or give his opinion on things. He was interviewed as a talking head for a BBC series once, but only for a version to be sold to international markets, so no one he knew ever saw it; the recording he made for another programme, explaining a historical topic to a celebrity, was dropped from the finished version, and he was very glad he had been bold enough to extract a small fee as well as travel expenses. Rationally, any hope that one of these outings might be a step towards bigger things had long evaporated – even the generation behind him of telegenic young historians was starting to look a little careworn – but reason had little to do with it.

There were so many different things one might blame: luck; hair colour; accent; being outside Oxbridge; not being part of certain apparently influential networks. The most obvious problem was a combination of diffidence – a refusal, for example, to embark on the sort of feud with an already-prominent figure in the same field that would guarantee attention, although this would be so easy in the era of social media – and stubbornness, clearly grounded in arrogance, so that he refused to compromise his own idiosyncratic standards by producing the sort of history for which there was actually a demand, insisting instead on trying to create an audience for what he felt was important. The result, when online user reviews became a thing, was that readers tended to express bemusement or disappointment, and recommend the works of more conventional popular history writers instead.

He might reasonably claim to be an unpopular writer of history – but that had never been the goal. What was the phrase for an unsuccessful would-be public intellectual, someone who would happily connect his academic expertise to issues of the day if only anyone was interested? Hardly a ‘private intellectual’, when he spent so much time now on Twitter – the blog had never taken off either, nor his attempts at writing pieces for online publications. One might make a case for the aphorism as a valid form of critique, but the temptation to snark for likes was all too strong. A public untellectual at best. He wondered when it was he should have started writing different sorts of books, to build a different sort of reputation.

Unless the real problem was that he had never worn a bow tie.