Homer truths

sir – Professor Jasper Griffin (Obituary, November 29) left an enduring mark at Oxford in the form of his disciples.

Prominent among these was the late, great Colin Macleod, tutor in Classics at Christ Church. Like Boris Johnson, Macleod had studied under Griffin at Balliol and vigorously defended his mentor’s view that critical appreciation of Homer had been overly coloured by Milman Parry’s idea of the Iliad and the Odyssey as products of a collective oral bardic tradition. Woe befell any pupil of Macleod’s who parroted such views too glibly at his weekly tutorials.

Biddenham, Bedfordshire

sir – Professor Sir Michael Howard (Obituary, December 2) was a governor of Wellington College in 1988 when I was interviewed for the mastership.

I thought the interview was going well, when suddenly Frank Giles (a celebrated journalist and, like Michael Howard, an old Wellingtonian) asked: “Mr Driver, would you have been a Cavalier or a Roundhead?” I said that I would probably have tried to buy a place in Lincolnshire to retreat from the conflict.

Giles persisted. I said first that I had always preferred Wordsworth to Coleridge; then I said that, on the other hand, I preferred Disraeli to Gladstone. Giles pressed me yet again, and eventually I confessed that, as a young man, I had worn my hair rather long.

This satisfied Giles; as he leant back, Michael Howard inclined forward and said, across the chairman, “You know, Frank, even in those days there were shades of opinion.”

Rye, East Sussex David Molian Jonty Driver