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Maurice Bowra

English classical scholar, literary critic and academic (1898–1971) From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium

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Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (8 April 1898 – 4 July 1971) was an English classical scholar, literary critic and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

Quotes

  • I'm a man more dined against than dining.
    • Parodying King Lear's "more sinned against than sinning" (act 3, sc. 2). Qtd. in John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (1960), ch. 9 — Knowles (2009)
  • Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between evensong and cocktails.
    • Cartwright (2008); or was "useful for filling that awkward time between tea and cocktails" — Mitchell (2009), p. 147
  • Splendid couple—slept with both of them.
    • On hearing of the engagement of a well-known literary pair. — Wilson (2009)
  • Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times
  • Where there's death, there's hope.
    • Bowerstock (2009)
  • Can't help you. Pity. Slept with him once—should have asked him then.
    • When asked by an undergraduate for help with translating a passage by Apollinaire, whom Bowra had met whilst in France during the First World War. — Atticus (2018)
  • Though I knew very well that I had nothing like Denniston's linguistic equipment for the study of Greek, I agreed with him about its purpose. The task of a Greek scholar, we both thought, was to revive as best he could for the modern world the inner life of the Greeks by a close examination of their literature.
    • Memories, 1898–1939 (1966), p. 257
  • Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was inconceivably bloody — nobody who wasn't there can ever imagine what it was like.
    • Quoted in "Blood for the ghosts: classical influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (1983) by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, pg 273


Disputed

  • Buggers can't be choosers
    • Explaining his engagement, later called off, to a "plain" woman, poet and Somerville alumna Audrey Beecham, niece of conductor Thomas Beecham — Hollis (1976), p. 22. "Allegedly", according to Mitchell (2009), p. 144
  • I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face.
    • Allegedly after being observed bathing naked at Parson's Pleasure and covering his face rather than his privates. — Doniger (2000), p. 193
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Quotes about Maurice Bowra

  • The life-work of Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, was to rediscover and re-create the history and literature of the Ancient Classical world. Though he became a scholar of international standing, he was never a pure scholar in the strict sense. He does not belong to the crystalline limbo of Scaliger or Bentley or Housman. His purpose was missionary: to reconvert a modern audience and readership for whom the urbane tradition of classical learning—in fact the whole august zodiac of classical reference—has come to seem deeply alien, if not actually menacing in its humped posture of intellectual introversion.
    But the whole tenor of Bowra's writing was extrovert.
    • Richard Holmes, 'A last act of witness to the ‘lost youth of the world’', The Times (9 September 1971), p. 10
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Wikipedia has an article about:
  • Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
  • Christopher Hollis, Oxford in the Twenties (London: Heinemann, 1976)
  • Elisabeth Knowles, "Maurice Bowra", Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 7th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. Maurice Bowra: A Celebration (London: Olympic Marketing Corp., 1974)
  • Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • Atticus (Roland White), The Sunday Times (11 November 2018)
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