Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
letter written in 1987 by Isaiah Berlin, that most genial and kindly of men and most<br />
acute observer, about a well-known Oxford character (now deceased):<br />
He is not exactly a stupid man, but the megalomania and the vanity are (as<br />
everyone points out) of a loony variety. The thing about X which is not so often<br />
noticed is that underneath the nonsense, the vanity, the ludicrous and dotty and<br />
boring and egotistical layers, he is quite a nasty man – very cruel to those who<br />
do not recognise his genius if they are weak and defenceless, and filled with<br />
hatred if they are in any degree formidable: a man who I think perhaps has some<br />
of the temperament of genius without a spark of genius, which is quite difficult<br />
to live with.<br />
If such colleagues are the price of authenticity for a college, no doubt we are better<br />
off as we are.<br />
But the distinctive ethos of Wolfson goes well beyond harmony within the<br />
Fellowship: the <strong>College</strong> prides itself on its democratic spirit and the way that<br />
only minimal distinctions are made between Fellows and graduate students. This<br />
openness is a legacy from the aspirations of the Iffley Fellows to create a new type<br />
of Oxford society. And this is why we have, for instance, a single Common Room to<br />
which we all belong.<br />
When we first moved into these buildings, apart from the Upper and Lower<br />
Common Rooms, there were also two small common rooms off the front quad<br />
(one is still there as a television room, the other has since been absorbed into<br />
the Library), and there was a suggestion that one of these might be reserved for<br />
Fellows, who might need to have confidential discussions about <strong>College</strong> matters<br />
or even individual graduate students. This suggestion was robustly seen off at a<br />
General Meeting (in those days almost everyone attended General Meetings), and<br />
one of the graduate students offered a rather appealing counter-suggestion: one of<br />
the churches in town, High Anglican or Catholic, was being refurbished and was<br />
offering for sale some of its old wooden confessionals – surely just the thing for<br />
Fellows wishing to have a private conversation. Of course this came to nothing, but<br />
with some amusement I see that there are currently moves afoot to create just such<br />
isolation booths within the Common Room by means of grotesquely high-backed<br />
furniture. I trust that this will be stoutly resisted and that the essential unity of the<br />
135
Change language