Robert Colls

Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Early life

He was born in 1949 in South Shields, where he attended Laygate Lane Junior School and the Grammar Technical School for Boys. His father worked as a driller at the Tyne Dock Engineering Company, a ship repair yard. His mother worked at Harton Hospital as a ward assistant.

After studying at the University of Sussex and undertaking Voluntary Service Overseas in Blue Nile Province, Sudan, he earned his PhD at the University of York under Professor G. A. Williams.

Career

He worked at Loughton College (1975–79) and the University of Leicester (1979-2012) before joining the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort in October 2012.

Main interests

Colls's main interests are cultural and intellectual history. He studies regional and national identities. He has also worked on the history of the English working class. His essay ‘When We Lived in Communities’ (Cities of Ideas 2004) explored the intelligence that sustained industrial communities and, along with ‘English Journeys’ (Prospect July 2007) is the nearest he has come to memoir.

Publications

Colls's first book The Collier's Rant (1977) explored popular song and image as expressed in 19th-century broadsheets and music hall. The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield 1790-1850 (1987) explored the relationship of miners to E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Geordies. Roots of Regionalism (1992) is a collection of regionalist essays edited with Bill Lancaster to which Colls contributed. Newcastle upon Tyne: A Modern History (2001), and Northumbria. History and Identity 547-2000 (2007) completed his northern trilogy.

Englishness: Politics and Letters 1880-1920 (1986), co-edited with Philip Dodd, was first of a wave of studies on English national identity and was published in a second edition by Bloomsbury in 2014.

George Orwell: English Rebel, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. D J Taylor in The Guardian wrote that it was a "prime ornament of Orwell Studies". A N Wilson in The Spectator said it was "the most sensible and systematic interpretation of Orwell I have ever read". Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph said that "If there is a better book on George Orwell I have yet to discover it". David Aaronovitch in New Statesman called Colls "a lovely writer, fearless in a way that academics too often are not". David Evans in The Independent said that "Colls writes like an offbeat mixture of Isaiah Berlin and Clive James".

This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. It won the Aberdare Prize as, in the words of the judges, "a compelling, evocative and unique explication of what sport has meant to the English". It was one of Dominic Sandbrook’s Best History Books of the Year in The Sunday Times and Melvyn Bragg’s Book of the Year in New Statesman. Alex Massie in The Spectator thought it was "much more than a history of sport; it is really an alternative history of England".

Journalism

He writes regularly for New Statesman and The Literary Review.

He has written and broadcast for television and radio, including The South Bank Show (on Lee Hall), Who Do You Think You Are? (on Alan Carr), Analysis (on the English Gentleman), The Verb (on intellectuals), In Our Time (on Animal Farm), From Our Own Correspondent (on France and the USA), Ramblings (with Clare Balding in the steps of the Jarrow Marchers), The Matter of the North (with Melvyn Bragg), Start the Week (on Orwell), Newsnight (on Brexit), A House Through Time (with David Olusuga), British Council (Durham Miners’ Gala), GNR Films (Great North Run), Unherd (on Levelling Up), The Rest is History (on Orwell), and Radio Free Europe (on Orwell).

He has contributed to German, French, Spanish, US and Italian TV, newspapers and radio on subjects ranging from English regionalism and Scottish independence to Brexit and Leicester City's crowning as English Champions in 2016.