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Cambridge, Right or Wrong
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12929 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1987 |
3,941 Words |
| Author
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Dennis O''Keeffe
Dennis O'Keeffe is senior lecturer in sociology of education
at the University of North London. |
THE RED AND THE BLUE
Cambridge, Treason and Intelligence
Andrew Sinclair
Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1986
179 pp., $17.95
THE CAMBRIDGE APOSTLES
Richard Deacon
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986
214 pp., $19.95
To what extent should human beings venerate intellectual distinction? It is a fair guess that most people - at least most Anglo-Saxons - do not. The opulent businessman and the glamorous film star, by contrast, are widely adulated in the United States and Great Britain. When persons with great intellectual gifts are famous, it tends to be because of their political activities or eccentricities rather than their scholarly accomplishments. Bertrand Russell is an obvious case in point. In his native England he is remembered mostly for his work in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. His philosophical and mathematical contributions are a closed shop to most Britons, who would be hard put indeed to name a single Nobel Prize winner, British or otherwise, in science or the arts.
Andrew Sinclair's new book deals with the notorious espionage of top British academics at Cambridge since the 1930s, and Richard Deacon's study concerns the Cambridge University elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Intertwined, they tell a story of glittering intellectual achievement, self-destructive vanity,
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