Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interrupt the heady days of evensong, buggery, and cocktails (to paraphrase Maurice Bowra’s infamous utterance).

I quote Bowra not only because he was the most waspish of Oxford’s interwar dons – a man for whom no bon mot could pass unbarbed – but also because Bowra, alongside Gilbert Murray and Eric Dodds, is one of three classicists around whose lives Daisy Dunn’s entertaining tome turns. Classics had class in those days – and heft. ‘Greats’, as it was known, was the University’s most prestigious school and the finest minds of two generations, though scattered across the colleges, were concentrated within the faculty which taught it. Some of the men who possessed those minds had fought in the Great War; many were to become heroes fighting Hitler – the spine of British intelligence. As Dunn shows, they were remarkable in their erudition and unparalleled appreciation of the ancients. Indeed, one can imagine both Bowra and Dodds – two men with little else in common – crimson with shame at the low technical standards now required for admission to study antiquity’s pre-eminent languages.