Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
All Souls Food
By Noel Annan
Words on the Air: Essays on Language, Manners, Morals, and Laws
by John Sparrow
University of Chicago Press, 272 pp., $15.00
John Sparrow, the former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, defies augury. The critics and social analysts may tell him that the world has changed and the manners and morals of his youth have now been discarded, but he will not be cowed, as the book of lectures under review makes clear. To be fashionable and accepted by the young, the arrivistes, and the successful is not among his ambitions. Saturnine and handsome in his seventies, his thick well-trimmed hair still black, he remains one of Nature's bachelors, but his makeup is not that of the inspissated reactionary. He thinks life too funny and absurd. Not for nothing is he one of the line of Oxford wits of the fabled Twenties, such as Bowra, Waugh, Betjeman, Connolly, Sutro, Harold Acton, and Alan Pryce-Jones.
Review, 4490 words
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