“Their air of moral superiority is really an assumption that someone else will always cook their dinner,” wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor in 1957 of the British establishment, a group he often referred to as “The Thing.” To no one was this term more aptly applied than the dons of Oxford and Cambridge. Those two universities, after two world wars and decades of social upheaval, still pave a path to membership in the country’s elite.

Disgust at Oxbridge for being a wellspring of snobbery, the humming engine of the British class system, or a finishing school of its imperial overseers has been routine since well before Taylor’s writing. Yet Taylor was writing as an insider, and his critique was one made in the spirit of warm familiarity. He was a don himself; he took his daily seat at high table at Magdalen College, Oxford, for almost forty years. He proposed that Magdalen’s chapel should be turned into a swimming pool and (more successfully) that women should be admitted, first to eat and then to study at the college.

His “iconoclasm” did not prevent his horror on returning postretirement to discover that dinner at the college had been reduced to a meager three courses. The son of a Comintern member, Taylor caused a scandal in the early 1960s by writing a book attributing World War II to diplomatic accident rather than Adolf Hitler’s bid for global domination. This scholarly belief in the historical power of bungling drove him to become a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, dedicated to preventing the annihilation of the world through similar rake-stepping.