This piece is getting some attention, which is fine.  Ray Monk is an excellent philosophical biographer, having done fine biographies of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  He argues that had Collingwood not died (of natural causes) in World War II, and been replaced by Gilbert Ryle, anglophone philosophy would have been very different.

I love Collingwood--more on that below--but I'm not buying this argument.  Ryle's appointment was important for making Anglophone philosophy a distinctive kind of philosophy, to be sure; but he needed the collaboration of JL Austin and the posthumus work of Wittgenstein, and the living work of GEM Ansombe and Philippa Foot at Cambridge, to make it real.  Plus the presence in the US of a number of very important analytic thinkers, some having re-settled there after exile from the Nazis (thus the Wiener Kreis, the "Vienna Circle"), who worked with the Oxfordians.  IT wasn't just Ryle, in short, and Oxford wasn't Oxford, and Anglophone philosophy wasn't Anglophone philosophy, when he was appointed.

But the weird hook Monk confects to hang his essay on should not deter people from reading Collingwood.  Not only his first-order philosophical works, like Idea of History, Essay on Philosophical Method, Principles of Art, and Essay on Metaphysics, but also--and I might recommend this book generally--his wonderful Autobiography, which combines memoir, philosophial reflection, and political reflection, in really interesting ways.  (IT is a bit evasive on his life, however--he seems, if memory serves, to have left his wife near the end of his life for another woman.  But maybe I'm mis-remembering.)  After reading the Autobiography, you will never look at Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue the same way again.  Some of MacIntyre's deepest insights are first formulated by Collingwood.  (The same, by the way, is true of GEM Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," which has to be the most potent, word-for-word, twentieth-century essay in moral philosophy in the english language.  MacIntyre is clearly borrowing a LOT from her as well.)  MacIntyre acknowledges the debt to Collingwood (and to Anscombe), but someone who does not know the work will not register the importance of the acknowledgment.

Beyond the nieties of philosophical bibliography, however, Collingwood is a terrific writer, and has searching things to say about a number of topics.  Plus it's very brief--can't be more than a bit over a hundred pages, about as much event as a life should take.  Anyway, I highly recommend Collingwood.  

And again, the Monk article is, umm, ok.