Set in the world that Evelyn Waugh immortalized in Brideshead Revisited, this is a true and often funny story of Oxford between the two world wars.
One of the protagonists in Daisy Dunn’s Not Far from Brideshead inspired a character in Waugh’s novel. Another married into the family who lived at Castle Howard and befriended everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf. The third was an Irish occultist and correspondent with W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats. This tale of Oxford colleagues and rivals encapsulates the false sense of security that developed across the country in the inter-war years. 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.
‘An amazing book, elegantly erudite’ Antonia Fraser
‘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. Focused 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
A Classical Mosaic
Alexias was an unwanted child. When he was born, a month premature, his father took one look at his small, fragile frame and decided that he was the product of an inauspicious age and that it would...
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