a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard, and, having my mind set on a literary career, I vaguely thought it would be useful to polish off my Greek and Latin studies with a degree from Oxford in Literae Humaniores (“more humane letters”), also known as Greats, a celebrated course in which one studied ancient history, classical literature, and/or philosophy. Each student had to choose two of the three; I chose the latter two.

    The picture of Oxford that many Americans have is an idyllic one, and the school is usually imagined as it might have been around 1910, with the men in straw boaters and the women in Edwardian gowns. In this world, viewed through a soft focus, the principal occupations are tea parties, cricket, flirtations, aristocratic whimsies, and adolescent despair. There one occasionally drops in on one of the dons and engages in witty repartee over glasses of brown sherry, or falls in love with the

daughter of an earl, only to be spurned because of one’s social inferiority.

    All this had little to do with the actualities of 1978. While there were glimpses of this past (to the extent that it was ever real), the dominant mood was much less frivolous. At least it was so in my college, Corpus Christi — Oxford is divided into colleges, each with its own history, atmosphere, and traditions. Corpus was tiny, with some two hundred undergraduates, but it had an august scholarly reputation, particularly in the classics. Over time I would learn that this reputation rested not so much on genius as on an extraordinarily well-honed pedantry. In one of Robertson Davies’s novels (I don’t remember which), one of the characters has his genealogy traced by an owlish and desiccated Corpus man. This was the spirit of the place, and while many students did not fit the mold — the graduate students, with whom I tended to socialize,