The Scottish Mail on Sunday

LIFE IN WAUGH-TIME: BRIDESHEAD v HITLER

- Kathryn Hughes

Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between The Wars Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 ★★★★★

Brideshead Revisited, the classic novel by Evelyn Waugh, created an image of Oxford that, even now, is hard to shake off. Waugh’s aristo hero, Sebastian Flyte, is an alcoholic who carries a teddy bear called Aloysius everywhere he goes. His friend and hangeron Anthony Blanche is outrageous­ly camp, affects a stutter and dreams of being ‘manhandled’ by the local lads. Narrator Charles Ryder, meanwhile, is the token middle-class boy whose eyes are dazzled by the decadence of people who consider it amusing to set fire to their college furniture.

In this clever, engrossing book, Daisy Dunn sets the myth of inter-war Oxford (above) against the reality. In some cases the borrowings are easy to spot. John Betjeman, future Poet Laureate, did indeed carry a teddy bear called Archibald Ormsby-Gore, while Ryder is Evelyn Waugh himself, a publisher’s son equally appalled and impressed by the toffs of the Bullingdon Club.

And then there’s a stream of gorgeous young men, probably gay but possibly not, who float around quoting Greek at each other (always a clue). As well as John Betjeman, there are the poets C. Day Lewis and W. H. Auden, not to mention art critic Harold Acton and poet Brian Howard. Waugh admitted to merging the last two to create Anthony Blanche. Women, unsurprisi­ngly, are thin on the ground.

Dunn’s particular interest is the way in which the spirit of inter-war Oxford, for good and for ill, was shaped by the classical syllabus. Her unlikely hero is Maurice Bowra, the clever, closeted classics scholar who is the obvious person to become the next Regius

Professor of Greek, at the time the most prestigiou­s academic role in the country. The problem is that not only is his scholarshi­p a bit old-hat, but Bowra was also gay at a time when homosexual­ity was a crime. News of his social adventures in anythinggo­es Berlin meant that it was E. W. Dodds, an obscure Irishman from Birmingham University, who got the job.

To say that Oxford was upset is putting it mildly. Dodds, a genuinely clever man, found himself sent to Coventry. People walked out of rooms when he came in, and some dons refused to let their undergradu­ates go to his lectures. Bowra congratula­ted Dodds through clenched teeth and went out of his way to make his life as unpleasant as possible.

Sharp-eyed Waugh, meanwhile, was taking notes. He put Bowra into Brideshead as Samgrass, an Oxford academic who is a social climber and a bit of a bore. Bowra recognised himself and claimed to be flattered.

This might all sound parochial, but as Daisy Dunn shows, there was something greater at stake. Hitler and his henchmen were busy building the Third Reich along what they fondly imagined were Ancient Greek lines. They particular­ly admired the Spartan practice of killing off weak children and invalids – a kind of rough-andready eugenics. Other, home-grown fascists such as Oswald Mosley went out of their way to win Oxford over to their cause.

Oxford, to its credit, refused to cave in. Many dons, including Dodds, went out of their way to help Jewish classicist­s get posts in Britain. A huge number of Greek scholars trained by Bowra joined Bletchley as codebreake­rs. And it is this Oxford, brave and progressiv­e as well as decadent, spiteful and shockingly misogynist­ic, that Daisy Dunn brings to life in this thoughtful, compelling history.

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