Humanities

Helen Small, Professor of English at Pembroke College, Oxford, adopts a pragmatic and non-polemical approach in addressing The Value of the Humanities. This topic has been much debated recently as political and economic pressures on universities and funding agencies have led to an alleged devaluation of the humanities.

Glen St John Barclay and Caroline Turner’s Humanities Research Centre offers the first historical overview of this prestigious Australian National University-based institution. Their book is an extremely dense yet remarkably comprehensive and well-written homage to one of the key international sites of scholarly research in the humanities.

Philistinism and anti-intellectualism enjoy each other’s company so much that it can be bracing to be reminded that it is possible to be both an intellectual and a philistine. That, at least, was a charge levelled at the British Fabians by some former members of the Fabian Society – and by some historians too quick to take those apostates at their word. The Fabians had unimpeachable intellectual credentials, but their preoccupation with policy, the mechanics of municipal and national government, and strategies for getting their policies implemented (initially by ‘permeating’ existing political parties, and later, in the case of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, through the Labour party) was such that they could appear ascetic and unmoved by the pleasures – and the potential – of literature and the arts.