Oxford’s magic has inspired generations of creative writers, some of them internationally famous, like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, others known to a more restricted but discerning readership, like Philip Larkin and Beerbohm himself.
The Literary walking tour evokes many of these unique personalities and shows you the places where they studied and relaxed, were rapt by religious fervour, composed in mad erotic delirium, or drifted away into dreams of other worlds and other days. Our guides, noted literary experts, will take you round the centre of “that sweet city… with her dreaming spires” as Matthew Arnold phrased it, and give you a genuine flavour of Oxford’s glorious literary past, and her vibrant present. Colleges will be visited so that the living atmosphere of the university, jealously preserved through long centuries, can be experienced just as it was by the writers themselves.
The tour lasts for an hour and a half, giving plenty of time to wander and savour the delights of the ‘English Athens’: its halls, chapels, cloisters, and gardens which, as W.H. Auden expressed it, the rooks still haunt “like agile babies.” The whole history of the English language can be traced in these ancient places, right up to a 21st century of dynamic change, and the resonant names of Shelley, Swift, Wilde, T.E. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Waugh, Amis, Philip Pullman and Le Carré will come to assume greater significance and fascination, even for those who know their work well. For those who do not, a whole new world of knowledge and imagination awaits discovery.
