The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod Page A

British Governors. In India, as ever, there are uprisings and massacres.
    Gone With The Wind, a film that most people want see despite the fact that it comes from decadent America and Bette Davis pinched the Scarlett O’Hara role from our own Vivien Leigh, is given the Modernist stamp of approval when it is premiered in the West End in the sprucely uniformed presence of Jim Toller, Major-General of the Knights of Saint George, the ubiquitous KSG, and Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces. John Arthur, typically, is quoted to have said that he too would liked to have attended, but happened to be too busy.
    Despite P. Wiseman’s apparent pronouncement of my death sentence, there are still many tests and indignities for me at the Radcliffe. I am congratulated on my resilience and given the kind of drugs that I suspect could trace their origins back to the Chinese opium dens. Pain, when it does come, fills up my bleak sense of absence, and I can feel, if I press my skin lightly, a walnut-sized lump just to the left of my ribs. Why is it always walnuts, I wonder? Where are the plums, cherries, conkers, cobblestones, quail’s eggs of human pathology…?
    Back at college, as the University presses along Walton Street begin to churn out acres of examination papers and Trinity Term slips past the half-way mark, many of the students begin to look ill-kempt and pale, their hair lank; their voices, as they attempt to make themselves heard in seminars over the chatter of rain through antique lead gutters, sound lost. It’s the bright ones I feel sorriest for; middle-class lads and lassies who’ve pushed hard to get here through late nights of eye-stinging revision, grants and bursaries, enduring the bemusement of their family and friends. Like me, although probably with better reason, they thought that a different Oxford lay at the end of the dream.
    It doesn’t pay, after all, to be too clever nowadays. Merely bright will do just fine. After all, the students at Oxford have to put up with teachers like me, whom they should properly have left behind them when they went to a decent grammar school. A couple of days ago, for example, staring out during a tutorial at the quad’s dripping oak at the hunched figure that sometimes seems to be standing beneath it, I lost the thread with one of my best students as we discussed his essay on the reforms of Peter the Great. He gazed back at me in polite amazement as I talked, but said nothing. I only realised after he had gone that my thoughts had got tangled in the pages of my book, and that I had been going on about not Peter the Great, but Alexander.
    But BC or AD—Ancient Greece or Imperial Russia—what use anyway is the solemn study of history? Give me instead a few juicy stories of Empress Catherine or the complex morning ritual that was the Emptying of the Chamber Pots at Versailles. I’ve always had this gossipy view of my subject—more Charles Lawton and The Private Lives of Henry VIII than anything to do with the reality of the past, when life was surely no grander or funnier then than it is now, and probably made just as little sense. All the rest is a pretence of knowing the unknowable, or downright lies.
    Oxford, meanwhile, as the rain continues and salty tidemarks rise in her stones, endures. She functions, as some wag must surely have remarked, in much the same way as a swan drifting amid the stranded benches of the flooded Isis. All poise and grace above the surface. Much mad paddling beneath.
    Living here at the time that I do, when for every undergraduate student there are two who are taking some lesser qualification or simply here for a weekend course; at a time when, whilst my college and a few others struggle to maintain the tutorial system, there is no essential difference between our degrees and ones obtained, say, at Carlisle Institute Of Further Education, I still find it hard to be certain if anything has really changed. Did not Lord Eldon pass his Finals