Fred Jenkins’s Reviews > Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History > Status Update

Accustomed as I was, in Oxford, to ask directions at the porter's lodge of a college, I looked down the corridor and saw, to my relief, a gentleman in formal, old-fashioned dress sitting behind a glass pane, as Oxford college porters were accustomed to sit. On drawing near, I discovered that he was not a porter. He was the great utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) in person, mummified in a glass case.

"hoping to score--in a series of three-hour papers, spread over a few days--those marks in arcane Greek (alpha plus, alpha, alpha minus, alpha/beta, and so on down..."

In second-year Greek, Gerald Cadogan, who had gone to Harrow and Oxford, used these on our compositions--we had no clue what they meant!

The secret of all this was Aunt Mai's trifle. The daughter of a stern teetotaler, Mai did not drink. But she would lace her trifles with so generous a dose of sherry that all of us, children and attendant grown-ups alike, soon became voluble and pink with pleasure.