Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia's self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had 'obligingly' described it as '"dangerous and unpleasant", which was what it was intended to be'. By the same token, the first volume of his massive trilogy, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (1980-2001), begins by informing readers that the author's mind is 'narrow', then proceeds to trace - in fond detail - the provenance of his Little England bigotry. There are further echoes of an Iago-like stage devil in Cowling's encouragement of 'irony, geniality and malice as solvents of enthusiasm, virtue and political elevation'. This Grand Guignol advertisement was typical of Cowling's conservatism, though it was also combined with high seriousness, indirection and an obscurantist difficulty in both content and syntax.

LRB 31 March 2011 | PDF Download