Many such tributes are recorded in this book. Elizabeth Longford said that Bowra presided over Oxford like a combination of Voltaire and Louis XIV - that is, with a salon that was also a court. Favoured protégés were known as "Bowristas"; and these included characters as varied as John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, Cyril Connolly, Cecil Day-Lewis and Hugh Gaitskell. Being a Bowrista could be a strenuous business: one act of disloyalty could lead (as Connolly discovered) to instant expulsion from the circle, and the need to serve a probationary decade, at least, before readmission.

What was the secret of Bowra's influence? A hugely dominant personality, certainly: here was someone who took over the conversation in any room into which he had poked his bull-necked head. Unusual intellectual energy: he was a classicist who also wrote about 20th-century poetry, and about much of world literature in between. He also had a knack for meeting all the most interesting people; few others, one supposes, could recall conversations with both Henry James and Adolf Hitler. (The popular story that he replied to Hitler's "Heil Hitler!" by raising his arm and shouting "Heil Bowra!" is, however, an invention.)

But there was something more. Maurice Bowra did believe that western culture depended, for both its development and its preservation, on an elite - meaning not a social class, but a minority that was educated to the point that the true values of that culture were fully embodied in it. The role of a university was to educate such people, and the role of a Bowra within a university was to pick out and cultivate the best among them. As Leslie Mitchell shows, Bowra was influenced here by the charismatic German poet Stefan George, whose "circle" of talented and good-looking young men had been a shrine to the principles of truth, beauty and Stefan George's personal authority. That Bowra himself was (in Mitchell's phrase) "largely homosexual" seems merely to complete the picture.