Maurice Bowra: A Life
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Maurice Bowra was, according to one's point of view, either the most distinguished or the most notorious Oxford don of the early twentieth century. Classicist, poet, wit, raconteur extraordinary, and Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, he met nearly everyone of consequence in the worlds of literature and politics and had stories to tell about them all, from Jean Cocteau to Virginia Woolf, from Adolf Hitler to the Kennedys, from Isaiah Berlin to Charlie Chaplin. By force of personality and intellectual range, he influenced the thinking of almost everyone with whom he came into contact. Above all, brought up in Edwardian England, he was able to chart the ways in which the values of his youth were tested by new democratic ideas. His experiences allowed him to develop and employ theories of education that were startling, and which would mould the thinking of a generation of English intellectuals. Based upon a wide range of interviews and previously unpublished manuscript material, this is the first ever biography of Bowra, and covers every aspect of his life, from soldier on the Western Front to Oxford classicist, from celebrated wit to frustrated poet manquéé.
List of Plates viiiList of Short Titles ixPreface xPart I Formation1 From China to Cheltenham 32 War, 1914-1918 273 New College, 1919-1922 49Part II Fundamentals4 Greece 675 Poetry 936 Sex and Sexuality 120Part III Action7 Oxford, 1922-1938 1518 Bowra and the Wider World, 1922-1939 1789 Germany and America 20510 Warden of Wadham, 1938-1970 23311 Bowra at Large, 1945-1970 258Part IV Reflection12 The 1960s 28513 Heaven or Hell 310Endnotes 320Select Bibliography 369Index 375
