Oxford in the Twenties: Recollections of Five Friends

Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Maurice Bowra, Leslie Hore-Belisha and ‘Crusoe’ Robertson Glasgow, all friends of the author at Oxford and in later life, each in his way epitomised aspects of the post-First World War generation of undergraduates.

Their careers and attitudes, the kaleidoscope of their friends are here evoked with extraordinarily percipient memories, often irreverent, anecdotal and amusing. It was a decade still scarred by bitter memories of the War and its subsequent social turmoil and nostalgia for the ‘Golden Age’ of pre-war undergraduate life that had been cut down. But it was a generation that quickly built up its own distinctive approach to life and Hollis follows through these influences into his friends’ later Hore-Belisha’s political life, Robertson Glasgow’s county cricket and writing, Bowra’s University career, Acton and Waugh’s literary and aesthetic achievements. They would, undoubtedly, have been outstanding in any era, but Christopher Hollis, himself a brilliant undergraduate as well, believes that the ‘20’s were a particular watershed for University life, with many new influences, and with informed pro- and epilogues he traces the history and functions of Oxford before and after his own days.