Inglis writes that
I am arguing for a view of Collingwood's life that retrieves him, as surely he would have wanted, from the parlour gaming prison-house of philosophy, and resituates him in a history, necessarily a history of private life and its presence in public thinking, a history also of how metaphysics may glow in the light of an ill-kept schooner in the Mediterranean as the gathering storm rolls in, on the face of a tombstone 1,800 years old, in the recollection of a mother's lovely face as she sang to a listening household, in the swift accumulation of pages of handwriting piled up towards a finished book, a set of answers to some sharp and pressing questions.Collingwood's biographer unfortunately, it seems to me, isn't going to answer some of those questions (why did he skip out on his wife? Did he launch clockwork mice at his tute students in a successful effort to disconcert them, as an effort to thaw the chill of his lecturing or just because he thought it was a fun thing to do and the thing one did when a poker wasn't available?).
Instead, he repeatedly bludgeons the reader with prose such as
However this may be, Collingwood moved perforce to London, rented a room at 69 Kensington Church Street, and every morning walked to work past the splendours of Kensington Palace and into Kensington Gardens. On his right was the bulbous magnificence of the Albert Hall, ahead of him the shining surface of the Serpentine and, as he took the Flower Walk past the Queen's Gate he braced himself daily for the shock to his system rendered by the Albert Memorial, with the great consort seated beneath his spindly, overdecorated, and towering shelter, rather on the lines of the giant candle extinguisher carried by the Ghost of Christmas Past.Inglis claims that
Finding room for these things in the house of biography is then to limn the outline of the fable. In the case of a philosopher whose first precept directs us to the identity of theory and practice, not only are thought and feeling indissolubly linked, they take both form and content in tension with mere eventuality, transfiguring those events into experience, where that rather blank (but venerable) concept turns out to mean events-that-signify, significance being given by the collusion of our best thoughts and the best feelings that may inform them.Quite; one can't have too much limning or brightly-coloured blancmange.
