Oxford

A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A Life

Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Sillery, Samgrass, Cottard, Lucky Jim’s professor, the History Man, all Snow’s Masters: these spring to mind at once. Why are they so disgusting? Perhaps some are false fathers to young people expecting more attention, like the pompous young Gibbon at Magdalen. Perhaps because they are obvious targets to would-be writers at a time of life when the urge to debag and deflate is strong: they seem self-satisfied in ways which cry louder for satire than the ways of more, or less insignificant subjects. The clever students don’t need dons. The dons don’t

‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to 1970 and successively Professor of Poetry, Vice Chancellor of the University and President of the British Academy, this short, powerfully built, unbeautiful, but magnetic man for years gave the tone to the university. He was a brilliant wit and a challenging and imaginative college tutor. Late in his career, he fought an intelligent rearguard defence of the University’s independence. His biographer, Leslie Mitchell, well-known for his works on Whig history, has drawn on years of local Oxford knowledge and unpublished