Description

Oxford thought it was at war. And then it was.

After the horrors of the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia – a dreamworld – from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures of the university fully formed in their heads, and women finally won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all was not quite as it seemed.

Boys fresh from school settled into lecture rooms alongside men who had returned from the trenches with the beginnings of shellshock. It was displacing to be surrounded by aristocrats who liked nothing better than to burn furniture from each other’s rooms on the college quads for kicks. The women of Oxford still faced a battle to emerge from their shadows. And among the dons a major conflict was beginning to brew.

Set in the world that Evelyn Waugh immortalised in Brideshead Revisited, this is a true and often funny story of the thriving of knowledge and spirit of fun and foreboding that characterised Oxford between the two world wars. One of the protagonists, in fact, was a friend of Waugh and inspired a character in his novel. Another married into the family who inhabited Castle Howard and befriended everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf. The third was an Irish occultist and correspondent with the poets W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and W. B. Yeats.

This singular tale of Oxford colleagues and rivals encapsulates the false sense of security that developed across the country in the interwar years. With the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich came the subversion of history for propaganda. In academic Oxford, the fight was on not only to preserve the past from the hands of the Nazis, but also to triumph, one don over another, as they became embroiled in a war of their own.

Publisher Review

Daisy Dunn's fascinating portrayal of academic Oxford in the first half of the 20th century is profoundly perceptive, frequently funny, and remarkably well written. Focussed mainly on the world of classical scholarship, she provides a lucid account of the professional and private lives of such remarkable figures as, among others, Gilbert Murray, Maurice Bowra, T.S. Eliot and Louis MacNeice, all depicted with an exceptional understanding not only of the characters themselves but the eccentric world which they inhabited. * Selina Hastings, author of Evelyn Waugh: A Biography * Naturally the subject is one which will always interest me, having known all these people as "the grown ups" in my youth... an amazing book, elegantly erudite. * Antonia Fraser * Focusing on the rivalry of three classical scholars, Daisy Dunn skillfully tells the story of Oxford between the wars: a story of passion, jealousy, debate, exuberance and foreboding. * Adam Sisman, author of John le Carre: The Biography * A work of mature and meticulous scholarship that weaves a compelling picture of Oxford at a time when the world was turned on its head, but the university soldiered on, tolerating eccentricity and nurturing greatness. * Charles Spencer, author of The White Ship * A delightful study of idiosyncratic brilliance, Daisy Dunn's illumination of Oxford as a place of humane minds is uplifting. * John Sutherland, author of Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me * The wide galere of interwar Oxford, with its High Table malice and wit, forbidden lust, and occasionally noble political convictions is encapsulating. For all the funny anecdotes and Brideheadian overtones of the era, sometimes decisions taken there had lethal consequences. The interaction of Dunn's three eccentric yet somehow emblematic Classics dons - Bowra, Murray and Dodds - stay in the mind long after the last page. This sparkling and fascinating book confirms the fact that Daisy Dunn's historical capacity reaches far beyond the Ancient World. * Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny * Echoes of Ancient Greece haunt the most eccentric of university cities in this poignant yet comic tale of hope and loss between the wars. Daisy Dunn writes with masterly control. * Will Loxley, author of Writing in the Dark *