Robin George Collingwood, the English philosopher and historian, was born in Coniston, Lancashire. His father, W. G. Collingwood, friend and biographer of John Ruskin, educated him at home until he was old enough to enter Rugby and imbued him with a Ruskinian devotion to craftsmanship and art and an adult attitude toward scholarship. Although Collingwood later wrote contemptuously of most of his teachers at Rugby and praised Oxford chiefly for leaving him to himself, his undergraduate work in Greek and Latin was excellent and in literae humaniores (philosophy and history from Greek and Latin texts), brilliant. He was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke College in 1912, and to the Waynflete professorship in 1934. Except for a period of service with the admiralty intelligence during World War I, he remained at Oxford throughout his career, until in 1941 illness compelled him to retire.

Although he...