Nicholas Shakespeare

Not really.

I mean, I confess I don't really read, I've never read any Inspector Morse or other books about Oxford.

I grew up knowing about C.S.

Lewis and Tolkien.

In fact, Tolkien was almost the earliest writer I ever met.

It

When I came from Singapore to the Dragon, the one book I was told to read for my homework was The Hobbit, which I could make neither head nor tail of.

Anyway, I got to the Dragon, and about a year later, Tolkien himself turned up for our fireworks.

And there's a rather wonderful grainy picture of Tolkien in his duffel coat surrounded by young boys from the Dragon School, one of which is me peering over his left shoulder.

And I wasn't really conscious of an Oxford through literature.

My book, I think, is much more an Oxford through my memory of being there from nine till twelve.

And then coming back 40 years later with two boys and living in a rented small house in Jericho against the canal.

So it's a juxtaposition of my two times in Oxford.

Well, I came across Basil Bunting much later in life.

I read a marvelous essay.

on him by Michael Hoffman, who was at Winchester School with me later on, and also at the same college at Cambridge.

And Michael Hoffman's one of our great critics.

He now teaches in America.

But he wrote this fantastic essay on Basil Bunting, and I'd never really heard of him.

And I again found myself tracking some of Basil Bunting's biography.