25 by Beverley Nichols — Read

In January, 1919, I went to Oxford. That seems about the shortest way of relating a fact that is of singularly little interest to anybody but myself. What _is_ of interest is that Oxford, at that time, was a regular nest of famous singing birds gathered together in the aftermath of the War, choosing Oxford as a sheltered resting-place, as though their wings were a little weary and their feathers rather draggled.

W. B. Yeats had come to rest from the storms of Ireland in a quiet, green-shuttered house in Broad Street; John Masefield was writing his marvellous sonnets in a cottage on Boar's Hill; Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, was near by, occasionally producing a few lines of verse which had more satire in them than poetry, to say nothing of such young men as Aldous Huxley, Robert Nichols, and Robert Graves. I must also pay tribute to Leslie Hore-Belisha, who is now perhaps the most brilliant of our younger M. P's. He did not write poetry, but his quite unmatched eloquence at the Union will always linger as one of my keenest intellectual (I almost said emotional) pleasures.