New Times,
New Thinking.

6 February 2014updated 28 Jun 2021 4:46am

How a gift for puncturing fads left one academic lonely but right

The academic George Watson was an anti-Marxist but never a conservative.

By Ed Smith

George Watson’s memorial service, in Cambridge this Saturday, celebrates his career as an English lecturer, literary critic and historian. He was a scholar but a generalist, an elitist and yet a liberal, a staunch anti-Marxist but never a conservative; his most consistent quality was a gift for alienating all tribes roughly equally.

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