Volume 37, Number 10 · June 14, 1990
The Brilliant Misfit
By Keith Thomas
Lewis Namier
by Linda Colley
St. Martin's, 132 pp., $24.95
When I studied history at Oxford in the early 1950s, there was no historian of whose intellectual presence my fellow undergraduates and I were more conscious than Sir Lewis Namier. Of course, we had never met him, for he was a professor at Manchester, not Oxford. Indeed, we knew that dislike for his notoriously obsessive personality, tinged by some residual anti-Semitism (or at least anti-Zionism), had kept him out of a succession of Oxford chairs for any of which he would, on purely intellectual grounds, have been overwhelmingly the most distinguished candidate. My own college, Balliol, however, held out the hand of recognition that the University as a whole had been unwilling to extend.
Review, 3756 words
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