Circus of Dreams Adventures in the 1980s Literary World, by John

Getting Dressed: William Dalrymple and Olivia

‘One day, son, all this will have to be sold to pay my care-home fees’

And then, in his final contradiction, Kuper says these lightweight politicians have been produced by a lethal, competitive system which produces great pressure on Oxford candidates and leads to a tiny elite getting into the university. He can’t have it both ways: suggest all these prominent figures are useless and lazy – and yet at the same time say they are sifted into an intellectually exclusive group.

In a crazy conclusion, Kuper recommends that Oxford get rid of its rigorous entry requirements to prevent this elite from forming.

In all these clashing arguments, one line in the book does stand out as spot-on. It’s said by Daniel Hannan, the former MEP who was instrumental in the Brexit campaign (and, I must admit, is a chum of mine). Kuper asked him why so many of today’s politicians had been at Oxford.

Hannan said, ‘It’s been true for ever, right? I guess people who were very interested in politics were more likely to apply to Oxford, because they think there’s more going on here.’

That explains, too, why Cambridge hasn’t produced a Prime Minister since Stanley Baldwin almost a century ago. But it has produced many more great mathematicians and scientists for decades for the same self-fulfilling reason – Cambridge has a reputation for science in the way Oxford has a reputation for arts (as well as budding politicians).

Nor does Kuper address the tens of thousands of Oxford graduates who live blameless professional lives without running – or ruining – the country. Or indeed those Oxford graduates who go off the rails, hit the drink and drugs and die tragically early.

The fact that a handful of graduates go on to high office seems a strange basis for attacking a great university.

CHARLOTTE METCALF Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World By John Walsh Constable £25

Reading John Walsh’s adventures in the literary world of the 1980s is like donning a pair of spectacles that bring blurred memories into sudden, sharp focus.

Circus of Dreams describes the towering tsunami of creative energy and talent that engulfed and transformed the fusty literary world for ever.

In his role as aspiring and then actual literary editor, Walsh worked for publishers and newspapermen who became household names, such as Lord Weidenfeld, Rupert Murdoch and Andrew Neil. There is hardly a literary giant he did not meet, from Martin and Kingsley Amis to Anthony Burgess and Seamus Heaney.

My own first post-university job was as a happy dogsbody for Virago Press under Carmen Callil, whom Walsh describes as a ‘menacing nanny’. Back then, the literary world was small enough for us all to brush shoulders with people who went on to have glittering careers, such as Tina Brown, Nigella Lawson and Tim Waterstone of his eponymous bookshops.

Like Walsh, many of us devoured Money, The Comfort of Strangers, Restoration, The Buddha of Suburbia, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The World According to Garp. We remember being shocked by the sex and violence in The White Hotel and can still quote the first line of Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’

Walsh describes people, events and places with such accuracy that he will transport oldies back to the era, allowing them to reappraise and appreciate it afresh. His memory – even if dependent on a diary – is prodigious, and his anecdotes polished till they sparkle. Standing together at a party, Sebastian Faulks and Walsh watch the ‘regal dominatrix’ agent Pat Kavanagh upbraid her husband, Julian Barnes, for ‘lingering too long in the hall’ with the ‘serial bewitcher of men’ Polly Samson. Sebastian turns to Walsh and says, ‘Flaubert’s Polly…’, referring to Barnes’s best-selling novel Flaubert’s Parrot.

Another time, Walsh gleefully recounts the story of Arthur Miller’s being invited by Peter Florence to attend his new festival at Hay, whereupon the great American playwright replies, ‘Hay-on-Wye? What is that – some kinda sandwich?’

With a successful literary career of his own under his belt, Walsh demonstrates a reckless disregard for polite or flattering characterisation, in favour of visual and deliciously mischievous satire, sometimes worthy of a contemporary Hogarth. He likens the agent Ed Victor to an ‘Old Testament squash player’ and describes Kingsley Amis (whom he found to be a ‘charming and beguiling chap’) as ‘the pop-eyed, misogynistic, cryptofascist of legend’.

Meeting Rupert Murdoch, Walsh finds him ‘an unprepossessing little figure for a global media Titan. His face was always moving: making little grimaces, awkward little smiles, little moues of concern, eye-narrowings, eyebrow-raisings.’

I savoured this book for its swashbuckling name-dropping.