When dons were still happy to be egregious

Before the advent of Political Correctness — the system of censorship which has settled over the English-speaking world like a dense cloud of phosgene gas — clever people were unashamed of being eccentric. This applied particularly to dons. I am reminded of this by browsing through a gigantic book, Magdalen College, Oxford: A History, edited by L.W.B. Brockliss. How lucky I was to go to that magical place when the people who ran it were still totally self-confident, and not afraid, as Belloc put it, ‘to shout the absolute across the hall’. This magnificent book, probably the finest college history ever put together, is a threnody for the weird personalities of the learned over more than four centuries.

My indulgent father, an artist, forbade me to follow in his footsteps (‘a bad time is coming for art, Paul: frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century’) but was anxious I be educated in beautiful places. When I was eight, he showed me, from the top of its mile-long approach avenue, the transcendent early 17th-century façade of Stonyhurst, its pale-green domes topped by golden eagles, and said ‘I will send you there if I can afford it’. And he did so, though it meant giving up claret.

Later he showed me the 15th-century tower of Magdalen, the culminating masterpiece of medieval Oxford, and said ‘You must go there, too, but under your own steam.’ So in December 1945, just after my 17th birthday, I found myself being interviewed for a place, in the book-filled room of Bruce McFarlane, the Magdalen history tutor. His colleagues were an amazing collection: C.S. Lewis, whose brilliant book, A Preface to Paradise Lost, I had (luckily) read; A.J.P. Taylor, who had just produced an anti-Teuton diatribe, The Course of German History, which could not legally be published today under Labour’s hate-laws; the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, then editing Mind; and the archaeologist ‘Tom Brown’ Stevens.