Not Far from Brideshead, by Daisy Dunn Alexander

those who experienced them, were not, as a rule, accompanied by personal violence. In a handful of cases, owners were killed, but more often they were permitted time to gather up a few possessions, and the arsonists could be courteous, even apologetic. The Earl of Mayo judged the men who arrived to burn down his home, Palmerstown, County Kildare, in January 1923 to have been ‘excessively polite’.

What was the motivation behind these attacks? Dooley argues they were primarily, although not exclusively, manifestations of an ongoing desire among the rural population for complete land ownership. While legislation over the previous decades had encouraged the break-up of great estates throughout the country, house-owners frequently still retained large amounts of demesne land around their properties. In some cases, a hunger to acquire this land – a belief that if a house were destroyed, its occupant would leave – encouraged the incursions.

But there were other factors at play, not least the typical breakdown of law and order during a time of upheaval, which always allows for a degree of opportunism. Not only were houses burnt, but woodlands cut down, agricultural implements and machinery stolen, and sometimes livestock taken.

Although it does not sit comfortably with the image of revolutionary righteousness, looting is known to have taken place before, during and after a house was attacked.

And then there was plain indifference to the fate of these buildings which, to the vast majority of the Irish population, were alien places with which they felt no connection.

In an earlier book, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (2001), Dooley explains why there should have been so few and such tenuous links between the owners of these properties and the surrounding population. It didn’t help that indoor staff rarely, if ever, came from local families. And, during the late-19th century, the so-called Land Wars encouraged a widespread belief that these buildings were symbols of foreign oppression.

That belief still survives in some quarters, even though more is now known and understood about Irish country houses. However, indifference to their circumstances remains widespread. Previously what became of them was of interest primarily to those who might be said to have had a vested interest in it, such as Mark Bence-Jones and the Knight of Glin.

‘So how many women do I get for my vote?’

Today, thanks to the likes of Professor Dooley, who runs the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates in Maynooth University, further research has been undertaken and published over the past two decades. But this work remains primarily academic. It is worth noting that many more houses were lost from the mid-1920s onwards through abandonment and demolition than had been burnt earlier in the decade.

They are still being lost in the same way: at least three significant country houses in County Tipperary alone are currently at serious risk owing to neglect.

Unfortunately, academic research, while without doubt valuable, will not save them. Nor did it save Howth Castle from being sold and the contents dispersed. Even if the burnings have stopped, the losses continue.

Robert O’Byrne is author of The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland (CICO Books) Sebastian Flyte’s dons

ALEXANDER LARMAN Not Far from Brideshead By Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20

Literary representations of Oxford between the wars have been everywhere since Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945 – not least in John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960).

Humphrey Carpenter’s group history The Brideshead Generation (1989) did an authoritative job of separating mythology and legend from documented fact.

Now the classicist Daisy Dunn offers her own perspective on the subject. Does she have something new to say, or is this just another hoary wallow through well-worn tropes?

Dunn’s earlier books, including Catullus’s Bedspread and In the Shadow of Vesuvius, make classical subjects seem fresh and vital, rather than relics of the classroom or lecture hall.

Her erudition and energy are thrillingly applied to Not Far from Brideshead. It avoids the clichés of linen -suited students punting with teddy bears. Instead, it analyses the lesser-known (for shame!) lives of the classicists ER Dodds, Gilbert Murray and Maurice Bowra – and how they interacted with the great, the good and the wicked of interwar Oxford.

Dodds was a drug-taking Irish spiritualist and poet. He later established himself as one of the 20th century’s major historians of the ancient world, thanks to his 1951 book, The Greeks and the Irrational.

Murray was an Australian-born intellectual. Widely regarded as the leading authority on ancient Greek literature throughout the first half of the 20th century, he was at least mildly telepathic. CS Lewis called his lectures ‘the best thing I ever went to’.

And Dunn salutes Murray’s student Maurice Bowra, the most entertaining figure here, as ‘a gossip and a raconteur, a libertarian, a showman and a scholar’.

We must applaud his unceasing commitment to maintaining the gaiety of nations in his role as Warden of Wadham; to say nothing of his proudly maintained position as leader of the Immoral Front, ‘a rallying cry to make trouble’. Little wonder that he rejoiced in his pre-war visits to Berlin, which he called ‘the bugger’s daydream’.

A less accomplished writer than Dunn might have an author’s identity crisis. Should one concentrate on the classical literary criticism of the era, and omit the scurrilous stories about Bowra and his circle? Or instead favour ribald anecdotes of snobbery and bad behaviour, to produce a highly readable but lightweight book?

Instead, Dunn steers an adroit, measured path between the two, never omitting a choice story.

The effect is both refreshing and inspiring, like the first glass of champagne of the day, with or without plovers’ eggs – ‘Mummy sends them from Brideshead,’ Sebastian Flyte says. ‘They always lay early for her.’

Dunn’s narrative begins after the First World War. In 1920, women were allowed to receive degrees from Oxford, although their colleges did not obtain equal standing with men’s colleges until 1926. Vera Brittain called watching her peers receive degrees an ‘atmosphere tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled’.

This emancipation contrasted with the tension between the beautifully dressed, fine-lunching aesthetes who greeted one another with ‘the pansy phrase “my