He loved to sprinkle howlers into his tutorial teaching (for instance the false claim that Julius Caesar had gone to Ireland) and unsuspecting pupils would repeat them in examination papers unaware that the examiners already knew them well. He also kept a barrel of beer in his rooms at Magdalen. After Schools (the final examination in Greats) he would entertain his finalists and throw half crowns to whoever had included one of his howlers in their Roman history paper.Hat tip: Eric Thomson.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, March 26, 2025
A Joker
Averil Cameron, Transitions: A Historian's Memoir (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), p. 56 (on C.E. Stevens):