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gaiety and charm captivated Clark. Connolly he described as ‘without doubt the most gifted undergraduate of his generation’ – he was certainly the best-read, well versed in French poetry, Silver Latin and the Church Fathers. For his part, Connolly described Clark as ‘a polished hawk-god in obsidian’, but their relationship was complicated by Connolly’s melancholic temperament, possessiveness over Longden, and Clark’s didactic nature.* Connolly was a gifted letter-writer, and wrote Clark a series of letters which he described as ‘erudite, original, observant and so perfectly phrased that they could have been published as they stood’.6

      But the man who blew away Clark’s shyness and gave him the courage to be himself was Maurice Bowra, later Warden of Wadham. Bowra, an Oxford titan who had a profound influence on many of Clark’s generation and later, was the nodal figure of that liberal generation of intellectuals and educators that Noel Annan called ‘Our Age’.7 Bowra had served in the trenches during World War I, and gained a lasting dislike of officialdom. Isaiah Berlin said of him, ‘he was emotionally with the poachers, even when he officially crossed over to the gamekeepers’.8 His chief weapon was wit, which he used to disinhibit young men with what he called his ‘Trumpets, and kettledrums, and the outrageous cannon’.9 All Clark’s priggish fears and inhibitions were blown to smithereens under a barrage of bravura teasing. Bowra enjoyed being outrageous and shocking the prim – he was at the centre of a homosexual-leaning world he referred to as ‘the immoral front’, ‘the homintern’ or ‘the 69th International’. He loathed prigs and cold fish, and it is greatly to his credit that he was able to see beneath Clark’s shyness, especially as Clark remained entirely heterosexual in his tastes.

      Part of Bowra’s technique was to draw undergraduates out about their parents – ‘What does Major Connolly think of L’Après-midi d’un Faune?’10 In Clark’s case he invented a mythical personality for his father, outrageous and funny, which ‘lifted from my shoulders a load of shame and resentment’. Bowra had a booming voice, and came out with truths that no one else would dare speak. To his friends he was the most affectionate and warm-hearted man, but woe betide his enemies. In his autobiography he described Clark at Oxford: ‘In exhilarated moments he would sing snatches of Opera; he liked good food and drink, and knew about them … he had a keen sense of absurdity, told excellent stories of strange characters whom he had met, and was always ready to laugh at himself. This essential gaiety was at war with his appearance and manner.’11 Bowra’s wide culture spanned ancient and modern, and he extended Clark’s range of authors: the poetry of Yeats, Rilke and Edith Sitwell, the works of Turgenev. Clark later admitted that ‘I use a great many expressions, intonations and inflexions I derive from Maurice.’12 They also shared socialist politics. Clark would often refer to Bowra as his greatest friend, and they would spend Christmas together until old age. Clark would always be what later became known as a ‘Bowrista’.

If Clark’s literary education took place mainly in Maurice Bowra’s rooms, there was also the matter of his undergraduate course, or History Schools. The Oxford practice of producing a weekly essay, he later thought, ‘leads to a certain amount of facility in condensing and arranging ideas … it teaches one to write of everything at a certain length … about the length of a newspaper article, and so this bad habit continues in after life … I suffer from it very much.’13 Clark liked to give the false impression that he took a relaxed view of his studies, and as he laconically observed to Connolly, ‘If anyone will not take the trouble to read history, Maurois and Lytton Strachey are amusing enough.’14 In fact his reading at this time was deep, and his learning struck his contemporaries. His college tutor at Trinity was a booby, a hangover from Gibbon’s Oxford who was invariably indisposed, but Clark did have two great teachers, the economist F.W. Ogilvie and the economic historian G.N. Clark – the latter ‘taught me the little about historical method that I know’.* His borrowings from the college library, such as Ranke’s History of the Popes, occasionally foreshadow later references. He claimed that he only went to lectures in the hope of sitting next to a pretty undergraduate named Alix Kilroy (later Dame Alix Meynell), but as usual he was devising his own course of studies, and had begun the reading that would enable him one day to make Civilisation. When he came up to Oxford he had already read Carlyle’s Past and Present and Michelet’s History of France. At the university he started reading economic history with Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, the bible of the Labour Party and the book that crystallised the socialism that Ruskin had first stirred in him. Clark has described how at Winchester social questions were far from his mind, and when a debate was organised with the local working men’s club, ‘they seemed to belong to a different species and we regarded them as figures of fun’.15

      The change in Clark’s outlook was gradual, and there is no doubt that the main influence was reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a book that also made a deep impression on Gandhi. What was it about Ruskin that stirred Clark? Ruskin revealed a unique combination of artistic and moral sensibility. His perceptions on art and nature were often contradictory and unexpected, but were based on unrivalled power of observation and expressed in luminous prose. He was a preacher who believed that art, beauty and morality were indivisible, and that ugliness was wicked. Henry James observed of Ruskin’s approach to art that it was as if an assize court was in perpetual session governed by Draconic legislation. Clark perfectly well saw the many inconsistencies in Ruskin’s position, but nevertheless was captivated by his credo that beauty was everyone’s birthright. He was never to adopt a moral position about art and beauty, but what he took from Ruskin was not only his descriptive power but the belief that art should belong to all. The counterpoint to Ruskin was the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt,16 whom Clark believed was the most intelligent and best-equipped of art historians: ‘where Burckhardt is calm and detached, Ruskin is excited and engaged; where Burckhardt is sceptical, Ruskin credulous, where Burckhardt is sure-footed and economical, Ruskin plunges into one extravagant irrelevance after another’.17

      Clark’s other Victorian household god was Walter Pater, who preached the gospel of aestheticism. Pater’s famous ‘Conclusion’ to his book on the Renaissance exhorted Oxford youth ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, [that] is success in life’. Clark certainly understood that a passion for art made him spiritually indestructible, but Pater to him was much more than a brilliant stylist. He later made the case that Pater was a philosopher of sorts: ‘the aim of his best works was to suggest ways of achieving the ideal life’.18 There would be many echoes of Pater in Clark’s own work, particularly Leonardo and the unfinished Motives.

If Clark thought that the infection of ideas was the most useful education at Oxford, he was lucky in having another education which would determine the course of his life. On arrival at the university he had gone in search of artistic company, first at the Dramatic Society and then at the Uffizi Society, but came to the conclusion that ‘it would have been difficult to find more than three or four people’ in Oxford interested in art.19 Any examination of student magazines and exhibitions of the time reveals this statement to be untrue, but Clark wanted nothing to do with the aesthetes’ herd, and was rarely seen at undergraduate parties. Instead he went in search of art itself. He began to inspect, systematically, the collection of drawings at the Ashmolean Museum, one of the greatest assemblages in the world, under the guidance of the Keeper of Fine Art, C.F. Bell.20 Small and slightly

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