Word: oxford
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...like a scene from an early novel by Evelyn Waugh. An intellectual dandy, hardly a year out of Oxford and already weary of the world, dashed off a suicide note in classical Greek and then, as a mauve moon rose, swam wistfully out to sea. Not far out, however, his reveries of picturesque quietus were interrupted by a slight sting on his shoulder. A jellyfish! Shuddering in revulsion, he floundered to shore, jumped into his clothes and hurried home...
...upper-class English boys. Sent off to Lancing, a public school near Brighton, he found himself scrapping for perks with a pack of young snobs in full cry. He hated it, but in self-defense he repressed his homesickness and began to play the devil with his wit. At Oxford, where wit and atheism made him fashionable, he drank like a drain, hobbed with the nobs, japed and scraped his way through 2½ years of invaluable idleness. He wrote little but he peered at the peerage, at the descendants of the knights and ladies on his nursery walls, with...
...MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO by Ann Radcliffe. 672 pages. Oxford...
Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head) has put readers on warning that novels by Oxford philosophy dons are apt to baffle as well as entertain. The same warning applies to Accident, by Nicholas Mosley (who is, coincidentally, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, former chief of the British Union of Fascists), which is about an Oxford philosophy don, and which raises the art of the intellectual tease to the level of mild torture. There is no doubt that in Accident a fictional design of subtlety and distinction has been attempted. But it is a literary jigsaw puzzle with perhaps some extra...
...book seems perversely dedicated to confusion, like Oxford's linguistic philosophy which, from a puritan devotion to clarity, actually makes it very difficult to say anything about anything. Professor Stephen Jervis (and Novelist Mosley with him) struggles against this self-denying ordinance. After all, the intellectual show must go on. This is a novel. It is, the reader is told by one character, not about characters or society, but "about knowing...