Commonplace Corner

So I said, ‘How are you spelling clan?’ Tom Wolfe at the 25th-anniversary party for the American magazine National Review

To the best and greatest of men, I dedicate these volumes. He for whom it is intended will accept and appreciate the compliment. Those for whom it is not intended will do the same. Disraeli’s dedication in Vivian Grey (1826)

This book is affectionately inscribed to my young friend Harry Rogers, with recognition of what he is, and apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of The Author. Mark Twain’s inscription in his book Following the Equator (1897)

Beauty and grace are performed, whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard

You’re the only person I know who ever went to Europe for a reason.

Cleo to Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

G K Chesterton

Arbitrary redistribution of wealth is called ‘taxation’, a calculated debauch of the currency is called ‘inflation’, the exercise of ‘lordship’ by rulers is called ‘socialisation’, servility packaged with benefits announces itself as ‘the New Freedom’…

Michael Oakeshott

Oxford skylines offered spurious serenity in the form of gold stone against sharp blue, which of course I refused. I wondered what made this town think it was so different. Keep your eyes level and your feet on the ground and I don’t see how you can miss the ugly, normal, tooling, random street-life of record shops, dry cleaners, banks.

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers (1973)

effort, debt and doubts about the whole thing’s benefits.

Serious students

My eldest child went off to university in 2020 and was immediately locked down in his campus flat. That year, he caught COVID twice and never met a single tutor. Now, as he writes his last essays, his tutors are abandoning him to strike. His university experience has been overshadowed by worry, weakly supervised

How far from the golden postwar period, which ended in the mid-1990s. Then, university was the one carefree period of your life. You left home, free of parental supervision and, thanks to government support, free of serious money worries.

That golden period ran in parallel with increasing social liberalisation. Universities were the Petri dish of the permissive society: three glorious years given up to intellectual, social and sexual experimentation.

A perfect time, between childhood and the demands of adulthood, to study, yes, but also to be irresponsible and to make mistakes.

Now we just feel sorry for students. With a £50,000 bill on graduation and a tight job market, not to mention all-pervasive social-media surveillance, being carefree doesn’t come naturally.

But, with their soaring

Small Delights

Uncovering clothes not worn for 20 years, and finding they’re still useful and still fit.

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk mental-health problems, students owe it to themselves and their future to get out of their libraries and spend some quality time behaving, unashamedly, like complete prats: enjoying drinking games, snogging the wrong people, dancing all night, sleeping all day and discussing Teletubbies while high on pot.

Of course, terrible embarrassment will ensue, but the great thing about mistakes is that we learn from them. The broader their learning, the better equipped they will be to face the world and understand how and where they can make their unique contribution.

BENEDICT KING

FILM HARRY MOUNT NOSTALGIA (12)

When did it become so bloody grim being in the Mafia?

In the Godfather series, life looks impossibly glamorous for the Corleones. Of course there were all the gruesome murders to take care of, but what about the sharp suits, the sprawling Long Island family compound (actually filmed on Staten Island) and the sun-kissed weddings in America and Sicily?

Then came Gomorrah (2014-21), the terrific TV series about the Camorra in Naples – and now Nostalgia, about Felice Lasco, an old crook (a marvellous, melancholy, resigned Pierfrancesco Favino), who returns to Naples after 40 years on the run as a murder accomplice.

Naples has some of the loveliest spots on earth – the baroque churches, the Bay