One had better have been miserable at Oxford; all the best people were. (A clarification: I mean that all the best people at Oxford were miserable, not that the best people in the world were the ones who went to Oxford to be miserable). Geoffrey Hill was miserable at Oxford, or at least “on balance” rather more unhappy than happy. Justin Horton was miserable at Oxford; in fact, he appears to have been miserable at my old college. Was I miserable at Oxford?

In the ways Justin is talking about, probably not: I liked the tutors, the work, the academic environment very much. I think I take his point about Oxford being a “machine for hurting people” - watching the programme on Channel 4 some time ago about the academic tribulations of St Hilda’s students, it was painfully clear that some of them were indeed in a world of hurt. And some of the people around me at Lincoln were suffering in similar ways: anxious, struggling, in their own eyes constantly demeaned and patronised. I say “in their own eyes”, because the same experiences that they found dispiriting were ones that I found bracing: arguing with people who will interrupt you the moment they think they’ve detected a problem with what you’re saying, who will tell you quite brutally that they consider your reasoning inadequate, who will press their own case with the utmost ruthlessness; people who are not interested in consensus but in exacerbation of differences. Let us all be quite clear where we stand; and that we do not stand together.

That is especially hard to take, I think, if one has been brought up within the ethos of the comprehensive school, in which an over-arching solidarity is supposed to trump the narcissism of petty differences. My complaint with this ethos has always been that such “solidarity” can play as complacent conformism, the shared identity of that majority which always expresses bewilderment at the suicide of a peer said to have been bullied: “but this is such a nice school - everybody gets on so well!”. One has to keep vigil over the differences, even the petty ones.

At the same time, the point about the narcissism of petty differences is that it exaggerates such differences in order to disguise a more fundamental conformity, and the most pointed critiques of the Oxford mentality have always targetted that underlying conformity, which is a conformity not of opinion but of attitude (which in turn shapes and regulates opinion, distinguishing the acceptable differences from the unacceptable ones). The would-be “independent” thinker is often the thinker most blind to his real dependencies; and Oxford is (or was) full of people pulling desperately on the teat of social approval in between bouts of solipsistic mewling and puking.

This didn’t make me particularly miserable at the time - I was up for a spot of solipsistic mewling and puking myself - but it did get to be boring after a while, and it was some years before I found myself noticing that I had become a much less anxious person than I had been at Oxford, and started wondering why that was. It wasn’t, certainly, to do with “academic pressure” - nobody ever asked me to do anything I didn’t feel I could do quite easily, and I spent much of my time acquiring the sort of theoretico-rhetorical arsenal that meant I could always turbo-bullshit my way out of trouble if the need arose. The anxiety, I think, came from the distortion of normal patterns of social interaction, the way almost every encounter with another person could become charged with immense and potentially traumatising significance, as if one were a character in an Iris Murdoch novel. This was, I must admit, something I did rather a lot to other people; but I certainly wasn’t the only one.

If I am honest, I should say that I was rather a practitioner of the art of making other people miserable at Oxford; or at least a willing and enthusiastic participant in what one would probably nowadays call a “culture of misery”. The allure of that culture wore off gradually over three years, and I started to value kindness a little more as it did so, but even now my wife - for example - accuses me of thinking it more important to be witty than to be assuaging. (My substitution, here, of the word “assuaging” for the word “kind” is itself indicative of a lingering mistrust on my part towards the imperatives of empathy and complaisance; I would also want to say that it is possible to be witty and kind, and kind without being simply assuaging: gently rebuking wit helps one keep one’s chin up. Nietzsche’s aphorism about being a hard bed to one’s friends is very dear to me; but it turns out to be rotten marital advice. Then again, who’d go to Nietzsche for marital advice?)

A word on Justin Horton’s disparaging comments about “chick-lit”: he’s not wrong there. I consider Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes the locus classicus of the genre “Female Oxford Graduate Writes Book About Culture Shock Of Moving To London And Getting A ‘Real’ If Impeccably Middle Class Job”. And what a waste of ink and paper it is, too.