A history of academic life stands and falls by the number and quality of its anecdotes. On this count, Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons unquestionably delivers. Did you know that the biologist Francis Crick wrote to Winston Churchill suggesting that an educational institution named after the statesman would be better off with a college brothel than the proposed chapel? Or that Eleanor Plumer, an early principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, told the fellows of her fledgling institution that if they simply must have children, could they ‘kindly ensure’ they had them ‘in the University vacation’?

At times, the book can seem to be an anthology of such anecdotes, combining, often in the same story, the world-historic and sociologically significant with the gossipy and trivial. What gives the stories their point is an argument to the effect that the second world war was the making of the Oxbridge don. Employment in intelligence, diplomacy, propaganda and the civil service endowed a generation of scholars with a worldliness and self-confidence that licensed them to occupy an outsized role in British cultural life for the following three decades. The former pacifists and radicals of the 1930s had operated at the summit of national affairs. It became correspondingly difficult after 1945 to disavow the values of the society for which so many of their contemporaries had died. The result was a caste that was (unlike their French counterparts) complacently, serenely integrated into the British Establishment.

Thatcherites and their successors may have suspected that dons were having more fun than was altogether seemly

The narrative that follows is organised as what Kidd calls a roman-fleuve of thematic episodes. The prolonged Oxbridge resistance to sociology as a discipline is treated as a revealing index of donnish cultural assumptions and snobberies, the response to the Kennedy assassination an unexpected insight into the nature of the supposed special relationship. Well-trodden paths – British intellectuals during the Cold War, the ‘Two Cultures’ debate – are deliberately avoided in favour of the siege of All Souls, the high noon of the BBC Third Programme and the debate over Margaret Thatcher’s honorary doctorate.

The characters who populate these anecdotes (and what characters they are) are pithily portrayed, and with a wit and asperity that suggests Kidd must be treated with caution at high table when he swings by All Souls, where he is a fellow. The Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe is ‘the anti-donnish embodiment of the unsuave’. The notorious John Sparrow is ‘immature, childishly selfish, with a juvenile streak of cruelty and lacking any reliable sense of proportion’. Kidd’s voice is itself marked by what he calls ‘the swish of donnish style’, and he worries periodically that his tone might seem ‘collusive or overly reverential’. It is a tone he balances with the regular ‘snort of derision’ at the foibles of his principals.

This slim volume without notes suggests that Kidd has aimed at the Oxbridge ideal of a small book on a big subject. But one wonders what a fuller and less swashbuckling study of this material might have produced. One would certainly have had more on what the scientists of the postwar decades were doing while their colleagues in the humanities were hopping from broadcasting studio to Royal Commission. The narrative closes in the mid-1980s, leaving the full consequences of Thatcherism – the Research Excellence Framework, the rise and rise of the academic administrator – just beyond the horizon. On the few occasions that Kidd includes some concrete numerical data, the effect is striking: figures show that between 1980 and 1997 the professorial minimum rose from £15,274 to £33,882, while that of a head teacher of a large secondary school by contrast rose from £18,249 to £57,399.

What comes after the twilight? Kidd correctly notes that no group has adequately filled the role that dons once played in British national life, but leaves it to readers to ponder on the state of a culture where TED talks, thought leaders and podcasters fill the void left by a vanished ‘clerisy’ – Coleridge’s term for an educated caste entrusted with the maintenance of civilised values. Already in 1951, Hugh Trevor-Roper identified a ‘party of darkness’ that saw the university as ‘a place of administrative efficiency and dullness’. Trevor-Roper of course saw himself being in ‘the party of light’, for whom the university was ‘a place of learning and pleasure’.

Kidd may be right to suggest that what Thatcherites and their left-wing successors had in common was a hint of puritanism, a suspicion that the dons were having more fun than was altogether seemly. His history, generous with the grist it offers to the anti-donnish mill, leaves us in no doubt that for a few short decades, they had a lot of fun indeed.