Oxford between the wars …

… When Oxford life resembled a great satirical novel | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Not Far From Brideshead is teeming with gloriously witty and cruel anecdotes, worthy of the place where an ‘Oxford secret’ is a piece of malicious gossip (usually entirely untrue) that you tell to one person at a time. But one of the joys of Dunn’s fascinating book is her ability to control the comic tone and leaven it with sober and often moving details. Bowra, who fought bravely in the trenches, carried with him a collection of Thomas Hardy’s poetry, and when Hardy came to receive an honorary degree in 1920, Bowra was there, ‘remembering how he had clung to Hardy’s Moments of Vision in the trenches’. The grand old writer now looked like ‘a very good, shrunken English apple’. Bowra’s unwittingly disastrous part in Operation Valkyrie, the thwarted plot to assassinate Hitler, is rendered brilliantly, showing Dunn’s acute abilities as a storyteller