Maurice Bowra

"Without you, Heaven would be too dull to bear, And Hell would not be Hell if you are there."

"Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was inconceivably bloody — nobody who wasn't there can ever imagine what it was like."

"Buggers can't be choosers"

"I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face."

"The life-work of Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, was to rediscover and re-create the history and literature of the Ancient Classical world. Though he became a scholar of international standing, he was never a pure scholar in the strict sense. He does not belong to the crystalline limbo of Scaliger or Bentley or Housman. His purpose was missionary: to reconvert a modern audience and readership for whom the urbane tradition of classical learning—in fact the whole august zodiac of classical reference—has come to seem deeply alien, if not actually menacing in its humped posture of intellectual introversion. But the whole tenor of Bowra's writing was extrovert."

"Where there's death, there's hope."

"Can't help you. Pity. Slept with him once—should have asked him then."

"Though I knew very well that I had nothing like Denniston's linguistic equipment for the study of Greek, I agreed with him about its purpose. The task of a Greek scholar, we both thought, was to revive as best he could for the modern world the inner life of the Greeks by a close examination of their literature."

"Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between evensong and cocktails."

"Splendid couple—slept with both of them."

"Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times"

"I'm a man more dined against than dining."