One of the more potent ingredients stirred into the cerebral ragout that has produced our current Prime Minister is his classical education, culminating in four years at Oxford. The course he took is formally called Literae Humaniores, commonly known as “Greats”. Today, its prestige has been largely undermined by PPE (philosophy, politics and economics, as read by Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, David Cameron and Pete Buttigieg), but it is still widely considered the university’s “premier school in dignity and importance”. Those who distinguish themselves in its final exams have special honour: Boris Johnson’s unexpected failure to get a first still riles him, so it is said.
Daisy Dunn’s ebullient but somewhat fuzzy and slithery book revolves around three Oxford academics who shaped this elite discipline in the mid 20th century, attracting into their orbits a constellation of celebrities – among them W B Yeats, W H Auden, T S Eliot, John Betjeman, Louis MacNeice, Evelyn Waugh, Kenneth Clark and Osbert Lancaster.
The trio’s senior figure was Gilbert Murray. Born in 1866, his literary style and moral compass remained purely Victorian, but he was an admirable man of many parts and extensive vision. A pioneering anthropologist of Greek religion, he also made groundbreaking translations of the Athenian dramas – notably those of Euripides, whose murky reputation he did much to illuminate.
Vegetarian and teetotal, a champion of women’s education and a liberal activist prominent in the League of Nations, Murray was evangelistically convinced that the ancient world had much to teach the modern. All this high-mindedness was leavened by a partiality for the novels of P G Wodehouse and a fascination for the occult, telepathy and psychic phenomena.
Murray was mentor to two equally remarkable men: Maurice Bowra and E R Dodds, whose antagonism came to a head in 1936 when outsider Dodds was surprisingly appointed Murray’s successor as Regius professor of Greek over insider Bowra. Murray had played a covert part in the decision – “the most contentious appointment in the history of Oxford classics” – and its fallout persisted for years.
