Who's Afraid of the Fourth Man?

[f4f3]

This isn't what I was expecting to be blogging about tonight. I expected to be talking about my Caledonian odyssey this weekend (Drumna-fucking-drochit?) or the kicking we gave the Bastard English or possibly the Guardian giving page one space to a racist and religious diatribe from one of our greatest living postcard illustrators, and probably I will, but I read yesterday's Guardian Review over dinner, and something caught my eye.
In the Guardian Book club column, John Banville writes entertainlingly about his decision to write a novel based on Antony Blunt. At one point he writes:
"Like so many of my generation I have been, and indeed, still am, fascinated by the Cambridge spies."
And I stopped, and crinkled up my brow. I'm not fascinated by the Cambridge spies. I'm not vaguely interested by the Cambridge spies. I don't, if truth be told, really give a shit about the Cambridge spies. Nobody I know gives a shit about the Cambridge spies, and nobody I've ever spoken to seems to give a shit either. I've always thought I was immune from the Oxbridge chip on my shoulder. I didn't go there, nobody else I know did either, and it never seemed even an option to worry about from my point of view. But I do wonder that somone could say that "So many of his generation" did care. I tend to regard myself as pretty mundane, in that my interests and fascinations are pretty reflective of everyone else's, but I seem to have a blind spot here.
So, knowing that some of my F's out there did go to Oxbridge, is anyone out there fascinated by this? Am I in this particular way less than mundane? Or is it an example of the lensing affect caused by so many of our opinion formers coming from such a closeted background?

Comments

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

What were the other eight ninths in?

I like the idea of the history of spying being taught... But how do you know they were telling the truth? ;)

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

blimey. I only vaguely remember....
- Two ninths was European History 1500 to present day (Peter and Catherine the Great, bits of French Revolution, Bismarck, Mussolini, some Nazis)
- One ninth was the Glorious Revolution
- One ninth was British social and economic history 1870-present (literacy, welfare reform, Mrs Gaskell)
- One ninth was American History (post civil war reconstruction, depression, Wall Street Crash)
- One ninth was British social and economic history 1500-1715 (peasants, church records, farming)
- One ninth was British political and constitutional history 1715-1870 (Walpole, Walpole, Walpole)
- One ninth was the spies
- One ninth was historiography

I THINK. Do you wish you'd never asked?

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

i wish he'd never asked - that sounds so much more interesting than:
Scottish Legal System
Contracts
Evidence
Delict (so dull I actually forgot the name)
Property Trusts and Succession
Mercantile Law
Tax
Criminal Law
Conveyancing (espescially conveyancing)
and probably more that I've forgotten.
Only Constitutional Law, Forensic Medicine, Jurisprudence and Moral Philosophy (I slipped that in under an obscure rule that let it count towards my degree) were interesting.