Some Lions

The Winged Lion of Venice

and a smaller, gilded version

Heraldic Lion, Bologna

Stone Lion, Oxford

and mate..

Lion with remarkable manual dexterity 

outside the Houses of Parliament

Nelson's Memorial, St Paul's

I think the Google Wizard is getting smarter...

It created a Panorama from the snaps I took from the top of the Sheldonian Theatre on Saturday. 

As is the way of August the streets of Oxford were absolutely heaving with tourists - whole coach loads of people crowded into what is really quite a small city, until pavements were overrun and I had to step off into the road get past - but many of the museums surprisingly quiet. I assume they're all there for tours of the colleges.

The Raphael exhibition at the Ashmolean was one of the busier things. You get up close to properly inspect the drawings, and that's a clear invitation to linger. They really are beautiful, and you can see how he was thinking with the pencil in his hand, shaping the limbs, making adjustments, cross-hatching to suggest shade.

The Jane Austen exhibition at the Weston library was also well worth seeing - much quieter than the Raphael, and smaller, but completely free, so you could drift about in a pleasantly idle way and try to read her writing.

Those were the specific things I went to Oxford for, but the bookshops and a wander down the river were also (as always) a draw.

I returned with:

Ghosts of London by H V Morton.
I've read Morton's other London books - the ones written earlier and the one written after, but this was first published, and in part written, shortly after war was declared in 1939, and although H V insists that 'Wars come to an end, but London will go on' there is still an underlying feeling that he is hurriedly chronicling old customs before the chance is lost forever. There are real ghosts here.

The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie, which is a collection of short stories with a slightly more occult and creepy slant than you find in her book length stories.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which I recently saw mentioned in P D James' book about crime writing, but haven't yet read.

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, which is one of those interesting looking Pelicans.

And I've done lots of London stuff, including wet walks along the Embankment and Summer Lates at St Paul's, but those can wait for another post.  

Ox and Elephant

I was in Oxford for 3 days this week, for no other reason than wanting a break from the norm. I left with three library books, only one of which I actually read. 

A Brief History of Capitalism according to the Jubilee line, is the last and not the worst but certainly not the best of the series (Penguin Lines) I've read. As a work of fiction it's way too ambitious for the 100-odd pages. Political debate, a life and death situation, historical characters popping up and everything made that much harder because he's done it as a dream sequence. I've never read a dream sequence yet that was convincing. 

I mean, it didn't even have limestone elephants in it. 

Instead of my library books I bought and read The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and Respectable by Lynsey Hanley (both are very good and have made my 'books I enjoyed' sidebar), and bought but haven't yet read Robinson Crusoe (which I need for my next essay), Cathedrals and Castles by Henry James, which is a slim English Journeys paperback, and Vita Sackville West's Garden Book.  

I also went to Rousham Gardens, which are lovely.

You can apparently get the bus from near the war memorial but I took the train because I wanted to go back to Heyford, which I've walked through before when 'doing' the Oxford canal. I even had some thoughts of going into Banbury or strolling down into Tackley to check if it's as pretty as I remember it, but in the end I preferred to sit in the cafe by the canal for an hour drinking tea until it was time to take the train back to Oxford again.

Insert caption about 'Dreaming Spires' here. 

Death on The Cherwell - Mavis Doriel Hay

I was tempted to title this review The Four Marys Find a Body. Our young sleuths - girls in their first year at Persephone College, Oxford - are very much of that mould. Cheery young chapesses who find the body of their dead bursar floating down the river in a canoe and field it into shore and try to revive her. 

Sadly, and despite all having their girl guide badges for reviving dead bursars, they fail, so they decide to form a league to find out who killed her instead. 

I'm being mean. I actually enjoyed this book, and in some ways it's refreshing to see this age group portrayed as naïve – because in real life many teenagers still are, and it’s a thing that you rarely see in books (often even quite young teens are portrayed as all too knowing, if not actively corrupted).

But I don't think they were ever as naïve as all this, were they? Not to the point that they only remember about fingerprints after they've removed and manhandled a possible piece of evidence, and decide to hide in the grounds and spy through the window of the man they consider the main suspect by standing on a stack of flowerpots (I mean really, flowerpots? What could possibly go wrong there?).

Also it never seems to cross the girls’ minds that possibly the male student friend of their fellow scholar could have been in their grounds late at night for *coughs discreetly* reasons that are if not innocent then at least not criminal. Perhaps I grew up in a more wicked age but my mind immediately went to the gutter, and I bet it’s where the Dean’s mind would have gone too. 

The book is one of the reprints under the British Library Crime Classics label and much as I enjoyed it I still think it deserved rediscovery more for historical interest than as a murder mystery. The investigations are fairly absurd on the amateur side and not very interesting on the police side, but the point and place in time is key: the 30s in Oxford, where the women’s colleges are clearly there to stay and the younger generation (of both sexes) take the ‘new’ status quo very much for granted; but also where one character can still say of Cambridge 'why would you want to go somewhere that won’t give you a degree.’

Inevitably, given where and when it is set comparisons are bound to be made with Sayer’s Gaudy Night (which came out in the same year), but in fact there are very few points in common. Both Sayers and Hay pick up (and are understandably irritated by) the way the newspapers describe what they call ‘graduettes’, but Sayers is firmly not from the POV of the students, far more occupied with gender and learning, and much darker. 

This is more of a girl’s own adventure tale, less accomplished and lighter in tone. The setup actually quite original, the characters consistent, and nothing jarringly wrong in the writing. But very, very light, and you can see why the one is still in print more than 80 years later and this (until now) hasn’t been. If it were contemporary it might sell very nicely, make a film (in fact it would make quite a good film with editing) and then be forgotten in a few years, which is presumably exactly what happened in 1931.

Photo taken by the Cherwell, facing Christ Church, Oxford

Oxford

More blue skies - this time over the Bodleian Library early last week. Oxford is, as expected, much lovelier in the Summer than it appeared last Autumn on a briefer visit. The stone of the colleges is beautiful and warm, and there are books everywhere, as if the city were one giant library that hasn't quite been fully catalogued yet. 

I did some of the tourist things - a drink at the Eagle and Child, a brief tour of the Bodleian, a laughable attempt to draw the Divinity School. A museum, two other exhibitions. The botanical gardens, the market, a walk by the river and a lazy hour sitting watching people in punts and trying to sketch trees.    

I also bought six books:

Patrick Hutber - The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class (written in the 70s) 

Nicolas Bentley - How Can You Bear to be Human? 

Coope - The Quiet Art

Anthony Storr - The Integrity of the Personality

Graham Swift - Last Orders

The Golden Age of Murder - Martin Edwards

I have dipped into the Bentley and The Quiet Art - the latter is very dippable because it's all shortish pieces, an anthology of  (to quote Baron Brain) 'the rich and varied flora of medical thought'. 

On the other hand Nicolas Bentley seems to have been old-fashioned even when How Can You Bear was published (1957), and one essay on what jobs women should and should not do absolutely staggered me in it's certainty that he, a cartoonist and occasional author, felt he was in a position to tell anyone else what they should do with their lives.  

The Golden Age of Murder is about the Detection Club, and excellent, but I badly want to finish it before reviewing. 

Oxford and Books

I finished my Oxford Canal Walk a few weeks back. I did Banbury to Tackley in the summer (in fact on one of the warmest days in the year) and thought at the time that it was amongst the prettiest places I'd ever seen, all pink and yellow hollyhocks and warm coloured stone and the river cool and fringed with willows.

It was a little more bleak in October when I finally got back to do Tackley to Oxford. Ploughed fields and drizzle and that smell of smoke you get around canal boats. I didn't get to see much of Oxford itself either unfortunately - just enough to buy a few postcards and decide it would be very much nicer in the summer.

That's a view I still hold to after going back this last weekend, but we did find some interesting stuff all the same. The covered market, the exhibition at the town hall, a sale of old records (which I mostly went through going 'I used to have this one') and the bookshop that sold books at £3 each:

I stopped at five, mostly because of my one in one out policy, and so far I have read just one - and of course it's the one not pictured here because it's still in my locker at work.

It was The Jinx by Theophile Gautier.

A short book of less than 100 pages, with an introduction by Gilbert Adair and a lovely scary folded over cover that seemed so promising but sadly.. well, it was worth £3 to me, and it was worth reading, but I can completely see why Gautier has fallen out of fashion. His supernatural story failed to chill or move me in any way.

In fact it had me dropping into A level English lit mode. I could write an essay more easily than a review. Something in answer to a question like: ‘Explore the use of metaphor and simile in Gautier’s descriptions of the central characters. Why do you think the author chose to describe them using that method?’

I think the problem is that there’s too much beautiful detail. Uncle is a painting by Hogarth, niece has teeth like pearls and hair falling over her shoulders like black ribbons.  Every major landmark and passing character gets a namecheck and a few lavish lines on their appearance. The story is smothered to death by it. 

Unlike Dorian Gray (and I mostly mention Dorian Gray because the intro does) which has a tension between the beautiful and the real (Dorian chooses to be superficial, Harry soothes his upset over his lover's suicide by making him think of it as a fairytale tragedy and so on), this was all too beautiful and simply not real at all.

I might have cared more about the illness of the heroine for example if she hadn't slowly and beautifully faded away, her soul shining through her skin and making her look ever more angelic while petals from the orange tree that grew through her bedroom window dropped romantically around her couch.  

It's a frippery, a piece of fine lace, an essentially pointless book.