Americans visiting Oxford are apt to ask searching questions. Helen
FitzRandolph in her painstaking booklet has had them, and per- haps the harassed guide, principally in mind. Both will find the answers to their historical problems succinctly set out in it. Other more human questions which are liable to crop up, such as 'Has the type of undergraduate changed in the pest-war years?' or even 'What is the Oxford equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa?' are, perhaps wisely, ignored.
Nor must one expect to find the modern Cambridge in Jean Lindsay's charming Cam- bridge Scrapbook. Her university is the old, sleepy place, full of humorists and humanists —Godley and Calverley, Housman and Lowes Dickinson, and all the rest—whose affection- ate mockery and admiration can be found in her pleasantly nostalgic anthology.
DAVID WATT
Previous page
