The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The Greats and the good at Oxford
How three maverick interwar dons put their stamp on the classics degree that produced Boris Johnson
NOT FAR FROM BRIDESHEAD by Daisy Dunn 304pp, W&N, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
One of the more potent ingredients stirred into the cerebral ragout that has produced our current Prime Minister is his classical education, culminating in four years at Oxford. The course he took is formally called Literae Humaniores, commonly known as “Greats”. Today, its prestige has been largely undermined by PPE (philosophy, politics and economics, as read by Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, David Cameron and Pete Buttigieg), but it is still widely considered the university’s “premier school in dignity and importance”. Those who distinguish themselves in its final exams have special honour: Boris Johnson’s unexpected failure to get a first still riles him, so it is said.
Daisy Dunn’s ebullient but somewhat fuzzy and slithery book revolves around three Oxford academics who shaped this elite discipline in the mid 20th century, attracting into their orbits a constellation of celebrities – among them WB Yeats, WH Auden, TS Eliot, John Betjeman, Louis MacNeice, Evelyn Waugh, Kenneth Clark and Osbert Lancaster.
The trio’s senior figure was Gilbert Murray. Born in 1866, his literary style and moral compass remained purely Victorian, but he was an admirable man of many parts and extensive vision. A pioneering anthropologist of Greek religion, he also made groundbreaking translations of the Athenian dramas – notably those of Euripides, whose murky reputation he did much to illuminate.
Vegetarian and teetotal, a champion of women’s education and a liberal activist prominent in the League of Nations, Murray was evangelistically convinced that the ancient world had much to teach the modern. All this high-mindedness was leavened by a partiality for the novels of PG Wodehouse and a fascination for the occult, telepathy and psychic phenomena.
Murray was mentor to two equally remarkable men: Maurice Bowra and ER Dodds, whose antagonism came to a head in 1936 when outsider Dodds was surprisingly appointed Murray’s successor as Regius professor of Greek over insider Bowra. Murray had played a covert part in the decision – “the most contentious appointment in the history of Oxford classics” – and its fallout persisted for years.
Dodds was Anglo-Irish, a firm supporter of home rule and a republican sympathiser. Before his elevation to the Regius professorship, he had been based in Birmingham
– a city he found “inspiring for everything Oxford is not” – and he would never be altogether comfortable at its snobbish high tables. But his superb monograph The Greeks and the Irrational, published in 1951 and the result of his ardent interest in the mystical, was a revolutionary reassessment of the Greek psyche that still enthrals.
Nothing his rival published had similar impact. Although he was a solid and prolific critic of modern literature as well as a classical scholar, Bowra is more vividly remembered for his swaggering personality. Waspish, hedonistic and cheerfully homosexual, his social circle extended from Ottoline
Morrell’s Garsington to the court of Princess Margaret. His quips are legion (“buggers can’t be choosers”, “I am a man more dined against than dining”) and duly reported here, but he is more substantially honoured for his support of academics persecuted by the Nazis.
Dunn writes with intelligence and verve, but her book doesn’t quite add up. One suspects that her concept was something more rigorously focused, until a commercially minded publisher asked her to sprinkle in more anecdote and éclat – hence the fleeting appearances of peacock aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Eddy Sackville-West, the undergraduate japes of the Hypocrites’ Club and other clichés redolent of the fantasised Oxford of Brideshead Revisited that have little bearing on the central theme.
What is more crucially lacking is any exploration of Greats students who did not aspire to glamorous literary fame – for instance, Dunn tantalisingly mentions in passing that many of them ended up as codebreakers at Bletchley Park – or any sense of the broader context in which the culture of Oxford shifted away from the classics and humanities towards the sciences and engineering with the establishment of Nuffield College in 1937. What Dunn ends up presenting sits uncomfortably between an engaging picture of donnish eccentricity and a substantial essay in intellectual history.