Status Updates From An Oxford Tragedy

There’s too much of the Hamlet in every one of us; I thought and schemed and brooded, but I couldn’t screw up my courage to act. Time and again I rehearsed all that I might – that I must – say, and time after time I could not bring myself to the scratch. I saw in anticipation all too vividly how he would receive me. He would sneer at my interference and bludgeon down my arguments.

To a middle-aged don, as I might describe myself, or to an old don, as I might almost be described, there is no place more pleasant than Common Room, no hour more wholly pleasurable than that spent in it immediately after dinner. For here the Fellows of St Thomas’s, having dined, settled down to enjoy the comfort of port and dessert, of coffee and cigars. I had come, as I grew older, to look forward all day to that