The Invention of Love

"If I had my time again, I would pay more regard to those poems of Horace which tell you you will not have your time again. Who knows how many tomorrows the gods will grant us? Now is the time, when you are young, to deck your hair with myrtle, drink the best of the wine, pluck the fruit…"

A E Housman is, as he understands it, finally dead. The noted Latin scholar and celebrated poet of A Shropshire Lad is being ferried across the Styx to Hades—but beyond the stygian gloom on the other side of the river, he finds, to his surprise, the Oxford University of his youth.

Alive with the academic debates that shaped his work and the friendships that shaped his life, this is the Oxford of Ruskin and Pater, a place still marked by the brilliance of a recently departed student called Wilde…