French intellectuals are often vain; German intellectuals are notoriously obscure; British intellectuals are merely embarrassed. But are they embarrassed to be British, or embarrassed to call themselves intellectuals? Unlike other Europeans or, for that matter, Americans, the British have traditionally tended to be self-deprecating about intelligence. The habit of nicknames reflects a society in which “highbrows” know their place, and that place is to be eccentric, or marginal to public life. Academics are faintly comical “dons,” scientists are “boffins”; they live in “ivory towers” or are “cloistered,” and all are “too clever by half.” Unless, of course, they are foreigners, who are allowed, indeed expected, to be intellectuals. For the concept of “the intellectual” still sounds vaguely foreign, even suspect, to British ears. It was a suspicion that W. H. Auden ridiculed in a famous quatrain: “To the man-in-the-street who, I’m sorry to say,/ Is a keen observer of life,/ The word ‘Intellectual’ suggests right away/ A man who’s untrue to his wife.”

Yet these suspicions were—and are—not wholly unwarranted. The word “intellectual” replaced “man of letters” in English parlance only a century ago, imported from France and popularized by Emile Zola at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Hitherto the British had made do with humbler words, such as “educated,” “erudite,” or “learned,” to denote a person of higher culture. The ideal was to be “a scholar and a gentleman.” An intellectual, by contrast, might or might not be a scholar, and he was quite likely to