Maurice Bowra

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.

Quotations

 * 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
 * I am a man more dined against than dining
 * Parodying King Lear's "more sinned against than sinning". Knowles
 * 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


 * 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
 * About Isaiah Berlin. Letter to Noel Annan quoted in Lloyd-Jones, p. 53.


 * 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


 * Where there's death, there's hope.
 * G. W. Bowersock, 2009. "Unquiet Flows the Don", The New Republic, [review of Mitchell (2009), 5 October.
 * 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