Maurice bowra

The leaves had yet to fall as Melvyn Bragg left his native Cumbria and arrived in Oxford by train in the autumn of 1958 to read Modern History at Wadham College. Weighed down with suitcases, the grammar-school boy admired the town’s medieval core; but his first impression was of ‘effortless wealth and privilege everywhere’. Oxford was still largely dominated by public schoolboys, but it also featured those who had served in uniform, which added a note of gravitas to the atmosphere. On both counts, it was foreign terrain to Bragg, who pined for the familiar sights and sounds of his close-knit hometown of Wigton: ‘I could close my eyes and

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend Harold Acton, immortalised as Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, once bumped into the wife of John Beazley, a lecturer in ancient Greek pottery, while she was exercising their pet goose in Christ Church’s Tom Quad. Hopping over the bird, Acton intuitively doffed his hat. Here, Marie Beazley declared, was ‘a true gentleman’. Mrs Beazley was famous in academic circles for her unpredictable remarks. Over dinner with undergraduates she once announced: ‘My husband can make sparks fly from my loins.’ Her daughter married the poet Louis MacNeice, who made his own pithy observation of the dons of Oxford as ‘scraggy-necked baldheads in gown and hood looking like