All Souls

At High Table in an Oxford college no one has a sharper eye for Oxford mores than the visiting Spanish lecturer. He turns his bold continental gaze on the Warden, lusting over the glimpse of cleavage shown by the young and pretty tutor, Clare Bayes, on his often eccentric colleagues and on Clare herself. Soon he and Clare have started an affair snatched hours between tutorials and train journeys far from college gossip-mongering. Observant and often hilarious, All Souls is a brilliant fiction about the strange unreality of academic life. From the High Table dinner, where the narrator strives desperately to converse with a neighbour whose only topic of conversation is his doctoral thesis on an obscure 18th century cider tax, to the descriptions of the Spanish lecturer s browsing for works by obscure English writers in second-hand bookshops, it presents a sardonic, outsider s view of Oxford.