On August 9, 1945, the New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Britain Not Run By Intellectuals.” Even by the narcoleptic standards of Times headlines, this was platitudinous to the point of self-parody. Of all the countries on earth that might have been run by intellectuals, Britain must be one of the last.

The intellectual who occasioned this resounding statement of the obvious was Harold Laski. The Times had just informed its readers that the “boss” of the new Labor government, which had just defeated Winston Churchill’s Tories, would not be Prime Minister Clement Attlee, but party chairman “Harold Laski, a pro-Russian figure.” Now the story was that Professor Laski, a leading Left-wing intellectual who counted President Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter among his friends, had just been cut down to size.

The well-known Cambridge historian of ideas Stefan Collini, who tells this story in “Absent Minds,” his new study of intellectuals in Britain, is sympathetic to Laski. So much so that he omits to mention Attlee’s immortal rebuke: “A period of silence from you would be welcome.”

Alas, Laski did not heed that sensible advice.A sensational libel trial followed the election, after Laski sued the most popular newspaper of the day, the Daily Express, for accusing him of advocating violent revolution. Cross-examined for five hours by a leading attorney of the day, Sir Patrick Hastings, Laski got bogged down in ever more convoluted exegeses of such phrases as “revolution by consent,” which abounded in his voluminous writings. Presiding over the court was Lord Goddard, a notorious hanging judge, whose caustic summing up reminded the jury that, while Laski had the right to express “seditious” views, he also had the duty to consider how “ordinary people” (i.e. non-intellectuals) would understand them.

The jury found against the great intellectual, and Laski lost not only his libel case but also his dignity. He blamed his defeat on the anti-Semitism of the British establishment. Mr. Collini concurs, but a more plausible explanation, surely, is hubris.To preach revolution of any kind at the very time when Stalin had just occupied half of Europe and clearly had designs on the rest was hardly likely to impress an English jury. Not unlike Oscar Wilde, Laski engineered his own destruction. He enjoyed a posthumous rehabilitation, however: the entry on Laski’s life in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by his socialist friend Kingsley Martin, omits all mention of the libel case.

This significant detail is overlooked by Mr. Collini. So is the fact that Laski did a great deal of damage in his life, not least at the London School of Economics, where he intrigued against his colleague Friedrich Hayek, who finally fled to Chicago.

I have dwelt on the case of Laski because it illustrates the flaw in Mr. Collini’s general approach to the problem. His main thesis is that Britain has been in denial about its intellectuals throughout the century or so that the concept has existed. He cites huge quantities of evidence to support his contention that the intellectual has been no less significant a figure in British history than his or her Continental or American counterpart.The title of “Absent Minds” plays on the cliche of the “absent-minded professor” to suggest that the absence of the intellectual from the British scene is more apparent than real.

But in specific instances, such as Laski’s, Mr. Collini shows rather the opposite: that in Britain intellectuals were never esteemed as such, never elevated onto a Parnassus, but were judged by the same criteria as everybody else. Because power, privilege, and education in Britain were diffuse rather than concentrated, it was never possible for a self-aggrandizing intelligentsia to impose a self-serving ideology on society. There could be no trahison des clercs because there were no was no secular priesthood nor a secular orthodoxy to betray. Absolute power corrupts intellectuals absolutely. The British have been suspicious of both – rightly so.

Mr. Collini identifies another form of corruption: the transition from authority to celebrity. This phenomenon is neither as new nor as pernicious as many suppose.The first English cultural celebrity whose face and voice achieved instant recognition by his countrymen was, he suggests, the 18th-century actor David Garrick. Mr. Collini rejects the easy assumption that intellectual life has dumbed down, taking the case of George Orwell to illustrate how modest were the readerships of the periodicals for which he wrote: Partisan Review, for which he (like the present reviewer) wrote a “London Letter,” sold between 5,000 and 10,000 copies in Orwell’s time, about the same as Cyril Connolly’s “Horizon.” Their modern equivalents on both sides of the Atlantic have substantially bigger circulations.

But Mr. Collini again spoils his argument by persistent political bias. Leftwing cultural heroes are always contrasted favorably with their conservative counterparts.There is, he insists,”a very considerable gulf” between the celebrity historians Eric Hobsbawm – “who has retained the high regard of fellow scholars while helping to orient his fellow citizens by identifying a number of main patterns in the kaleidoscope of modern world history” – and David Starkey, who “chiefly gratifies an existing public taste for colorful details about distant monarchs.” Collini fails to mention that Mr.Hobsbawm, unlike Mr. Starkey, remained a card-carrying Communist until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Hobsbawm is – absurdly – a Companion of Honor, one of the highest accolades Britain can bestow, but this only reflects the fact that Mr. Collini’s prejudices are shared by the academic establishment that influences the political one. If the Laskis and Hobsbawms who dominate “Absent Minds” really had run Britain,the British would never have played the part they did in resisting totalitarianism.

I have just space to notice a less ambitious, less kaleidoscopic but also less flawed book on British intellectuals: Christopher Hilliard’s “To Exercise Our Talents.” This exhaustively researched and elegant study of the “democratization of writing” from the 1920s to the 1960s makes a real contribution to knowledge. It is not about self-styled “intellectuals,” let alone celebrities, but the countless aspirants who make up the vast majority of writers at any one time. Mr. Hilliard tells us not about the sorcerers, but about their apprentices. And what a refreshingly original book it is, too.

Mr. Johnson last wrote for these pages about Israel and the settlements.