Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) was an eminence—warden of Wadham College, Oxford, briefly the university’s vice chancellor, president of the British Academy, and author of many books, chiefly on the Greek heritage but also on contemporary European literature. He was also acknowledged as a great wit and a charismatic friend and mentor to younger people (most but not all of them male undergraduates), and it is these qualities, rather than his scholarly and administrative accomplishments, that make him an attractive subject for a biography. Leslie Mitchell’s biography is comprehensive, but it does not dwell on what Bowra did as vice chancellor.

Bowra’s witticisms are not to everyone’s taste, and some of them have the air of being intended more for future compilers of his table talk rather than for the people he was talking to—or at, for Bowra liked to dominate conversation. He also liked to dominate his protégés, the “Bowristas.” As an undergraduate with strong views and many sensitivities, Bowra had already formulated what he called his “system” for recruiting a network of younger friends (who would always in some sense be his pupils) and for binding them to him. Demonstrating the operations of this intricate machinery of shame, warmth, playfulness, seriousness, commitment, petulance, and malicious judgments of third parties is one of Mitchell’s signal accomplishments. Those who made the grade form an extraordinary list: Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Clark, Hugh Gaitskell, Cecil Day-Lewis, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Stuart Hampshire, John Sparrow, A. J. Ayer, Noel Annan, and others. Mitchell’s biography provides a wealth of detail on Bowra’s interactions with these men, though I confess that I still do not altogether understand why formidable minds would be so impressed—or remain impressed as long as they did—with Bowra as an intellectual.

The moment of Greek history that most captivated Bowra was not the “heroic age” nor Athenian democracy, but the period 550–480 BCE, a time when “aristocratic government in city states was often giving way to more democratic forms.” The poets of this period typically came from aristocratic families and, as Bowra put it, “sought to exploit the graces and gaieties of an aristocratic existence” (73). Aristocratic culture was the wellspring of Greek art and ideals; it infused the life of democratizing Athens, but within two generations Athenian public life gave way to vulgarity and brutality. It was a story with obvious implications for modern Europe. Ancient Greece functioned not only as a “distant mirror” or cautionary tale but also as a guide to action: “Its civilization, particularly the poetry of Pindar’s generation, should instruct the new democracies of the twentieth century what to preserve and what to aim for” (75).

Bowra is said to have been not uncritical of aristocracy and not “unhappy with democracy in principle” (232). However, his most cherished values—great art and literature, the primacy of the individual, the pursuit of pleasure and meaning rather than humdrum pursuits—he associated with an aristocratic mode of life. Actual democracies, West Germany and the United States as well as Britain, proved disappointing and distasteful. Mitchell insists several times that Bowra “was no reactionary, nor even a conservative” (97). He voted Liberal or Labour, though without enthusiasm; he had connections with Liberal grandees like Asquith; and as an establishment figure he signed his share of letters in support of civil liberties. But he was nowhere near as active and public-minded a member of the great and good as Annan for instance was. Bowra was essentially uninterested in politics. It was a bore and vulgar: the substitution of public action for pleasure and aesthetic cultivation was one of the coarsening consequences of Athenian democracy. Politics was also a waste of talent. It was an enduring disappointment to Bowra that Gaitskell chose a political career.

The cosmopolitanism of Bowra’s literary interests was thus complemented by a lack of interest in much that was going on outside Oxford. This boredom helps explain why so many of his observations about the places he visited in America or events in the 1960s are not especially perceptive. The lack of interest in large swathes of contemporary life also helps explain why he was able to nurture the whole quixotic ambition of hellenizing modern democracy: surely only someone with minimal familiarity with the social and economic lives of the majority of the British population could think that this was a possibility.

Although Bowra wrote many books for a nonspecialist readership, he was not one of those many intellectuals of his time for whom communicating directly with a mass public was a guiding ambition. It would be through his cadre of pupils that he would promote his beliefs. Bowra was one of those dons—like Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green in nineteenth-century Oxford and F. R. Leavis in twentieth-century Cambridge—who built an influential network from an intimate college base through the force of his ideas, conviction, and personality. Bowra would not have appreciated either comparison. He disdained the Balliol tradition of public service, and he patronized Leavis as a lower-middle-class puritan (111).

Mitchell’s is a refreshingly concise and focused book on a subject with a larger-than-life correspondence and a great many connections. It recounts glamorous scenes—encounters with famous people, literary soirées, reading parties with fabulous food laid on—but does not milk them in the way so many British literary biographies do (though it is socially indulgent in another way, taking the standing of Oxford and the class position of Bowra and his fellows for granted, as Bowra himself did). Its missed opportunities and false notes have to do with the intellectual and political contexts of Bowra’s career. We are told that “universal suffrage was introduced into Britain in 1918” (72–73). At Oxford, as at Cambridge, classicists were among the fiercest opponents of modernist literature, but Bowra was a vocal admirer of Yeats and to a lesser extent Eliot, and the author of an influential book on the symbolists. Did he find this incongruous? Did others? Mitchell’s use of the biographer’s free indirect style sometimes makes it hard to tell whether the simplifications are his or Bowra’s: “the bureaucrat, the politician, and the scientist were becoming ever more powerful in his lifetime. … Their philistinism had official sanction. … As a result their taste was suspect and their range narrow. Could there be any comfort in the knowledge that the best-sellers of the interwar years were written by Dornford Yates, Sapper, and Edgar Wallace?” (109). Leaving aside the fact that this is an idiosyncratic list of interwar bestsellers (and the fact that a comparable list for the 1860s would not look very much more inspiriting), did Bowra really think that Sapper’s readers were bureaucrats and politicians like Kenneth Widmerpool, the creation of the sometime Bowrista Anthony Powell?