Two Shades of Blue
Feb. 4th, 2018 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Oxford and Cambridge - An Uncommon History, by Peter Sager
I had seen this years ago and added it to a wish list, so I was pleased to receive it as a Christmas present. I hadn't realised until I read the blurb that it's a translation from the German, by a German writer, so it's interesting to see an outsider's perspective.
After an introduction, where inter alia Sager notes that Thackeray produced two imaginary place-names, "Oxbridge" and "Camford", but that only one of them has lasted, the book is evenly split (strictly so, perhaps) between Oxford and Cambridge. Despite their current reputations (the Head of Sixth Form laconically referred to them as "Thames Valley College of Arts" and "East Anglia Institute of Technology" respectively), Oxford has a scientific history, particularly in the first few hundred years; and he also draws attention to the wide range of writers who have hailed from Cambridge (though, it seems, Oxford is more often written about).
I'm only really familiar with Oxford, so my judgement of the book is based principally on this half. Sager begins with an overview, and considers broad culture, architecture, artistic and literary history. He takes a notionally geographic meandering around the city centre and the colleges, though as any fan of Inspector Morse is aware, the geography of Oxford is sometimes notional. And Sager is definitely a fan of Inspector Morse, with nods to Dorothy L Sayers, Edmund Crispin and others in the detective genre; though perhaps he didn't see Yes Minister as, though he notes the two St John's colleges in Oxford and Cambridge are named after different saints, there's no mention of the famous gaffe ("Isaac Wolfson, apparently, is only the third man in history to have a college named after him at Oxford and Cambridge. Jesus and St John being the first two."). But it did add to my knowledge of Oxford, too: who knew the first chancellor was a Robert Grosseteste (surely an Oxonian variant of the Viz character Buster Gonad) or that the Dean of Balliol in the 1920s was one Francis Urquhart?uitlander will be pleased to hear that the ethnomusicology collection at 60 Banbury Road is considered worthy of inclusion in the section on the University and Pitt-Rivers museums.
The Cambridge half of the book follows a similar pattern, and though I've only visited a few times, it matches what I know and adds to it. It does seem particularly striking that the same names frequently occur in both places, especially in an architectural context, from Wren to Gilbert Scott and Stirling (the Florey Building in Oxford is "a pretty monstrous specimen of functionalist architecture"; Sager doesn't volunteer an opinion of his own on the History Faculty library in Cambridge, but is content to share others, which are less than complimentary). As a whole, the book is quite thorough and amiable.
I had seen this years ago and added it to a wish list, so I was pleased to receive it as a Christmas present. I hadn't realised until I read the blurb that it's a translation from the German, by a German writer, so it's interesting to see an outsider's perspective.
After an introduction, where inter alia Sager notes that Thackeray produced two imaginary place-names, "Oxbridge" and "Camford", but that only one of them has lasted, the book is evenly split (strictly so, perhaps) between Oxford and Cambridge. Despite their current reputations (the Head of Sixth Form laconically referred to them as "Thames Valley College of Arts" and "East Anglia Institute of Technology" respectively), Oxford has a scientific history, particularly in the first few hundred years; and he also draws attention to the wide range of writers who have hailed from Cambridge (though, it seems, Oxford is more often written about).
I'm only really familiar with Oxford, so my judgement of the book is based principally on this half. Sager begins with an overview, and considers broad culture, architecture, artistic and literary history. He takes a notionally geographic meandering around the city centre and the colleges, though as any fan of Inspector Morse is aware, the geography of Oxford is sometimes notional. And Sager is definitely a fan of Inspector Morse, with nods to Dorothy L Sayers, Edmund Crispin and others in the detective genre; though perhaps he didn't see Yes Minister as, though he notes the two St John's colleges in Oxford and Cambridge are named after different saints, there's no mention of the famous gaffe ("Isaac Wolfson, apparently, is only the third man in history to have a college named after him at Oxford and Cambridge. Jesus and St John being the first two."). But it did add to my knowledge of Oxford, too: who knew the first chancellor was a Robert Grosseteste (surely an Oxonian variant of the Viz character Buster Gonad) or that the Dean of Balliol in the 1920s was one Francis Urquhart?
uitlander will be pleased to hear that the ethnomusicology collection at 60 Banbury Road is considered worthy of inclusion in the section on the University and Pitt-Rivers museums.The Cambridge half of the book follows a similar pattern, and though I've only visited a few times, it matches what I know and adds to it. It does seem particularly striking that the same names frequently occur in both places, especially in an architectural context, from Wren to Gilbert Scott and Stirling (the Florey Building in Oxford is "a pretty monstrous specimen of functionalist architecture"; Sager doesn't volunteer an opinion of his own on the History Faculty library in Cambridge, but is content to share others, which are less than complimentary). As a whole, the book is quite thorough and amiable.