Word: oxford
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...novel opens on a scene of riotous confusion: a midsummer night's ball at Oxford University, where a circle of friends who had met at college some 30 years earlier assemble to dance and drink until dawn. If this setting reminds anyone of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, so much the better, for many of the events in The Book and the Brotherhood make sense chiefly as manifestations of Renaissance romance: frantic and aimless wanderings, repeated instances of women falling suddenly, inexplicably in love with inappropriate...
Lloyd Webber attended Magdalen College at Oxford, in part because he had heard it harbored some of Britain's most promising lyricists. But the man who turned out to be the Oscar Hammerstein to his Rodgers came in the person of Tim Rice, a London law student with a penchant for pop music. Introduced by a London publisher, the pair hit it off at once, and Andrew promptly dropped out of Oxford. To hone his technique, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. His father, surprisingly, warned him not to let the school educate away his natural gifts...
...strained relationship. Buck begins Joyce's stream of subversive epiphanies with a mockery of religious ritual, and Pat launches Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time with a polite spoof on the rituals of orthodox history. Prentiss is a young Irish pedant, fresh out of New College, Oxford, and itching to write a book about a failed nationalist uprising in 1867. The final skirmish, known as the Battle of Clonbrony Wood, has become exaggerated in story and barroom ditty: "Let all true Irishmen be good,/ And fight for what they hold./ Like all those heroes brave and bold,/ Who held...
...overcoats that shimmered in the shifting light. He turned the appreciation of beautiful things into a private religion, with distinctly public manifestations. To walk about carrying a single lily in his hand was not simply to throb with pleasure but to be observed doing so. News of Wilde's Oxford eccentricities preceded him in the world at large. When he met a friend outside a theater, he overheard someone say, "There goes that bloody fool Oscar Wilde." Wilde said quickly, "It's extraordinary how soon one gets known in London...
When he returned to England, Wilde set about amplifying his fame. First, to stop rumors about his questionable sexual proclivities, he married and fathered two sons in rapid succession. Only then, at 33, was he seduced by an Oxford undergraduate named Richard Ross in what Ellmann asserts (surprisingly, in view of the Wilde legend) was his first homosexual experience. After that, Wilde's imagination caught fire. He wrote essays (The Decay of Lying, The Soul of Man Under Socialism) and reviews that kept him constantly before the public eye. Lady Windermere's Fan, the first of his plays...