It arrived. ‘With reference to your application for graduate study at Oxford, I am glad to inform you that the Faculty of Ancient History has provisionally agreed to admit you as an M.Phil. student with effect from Michaelmas Term 2002.’
To change the subject. Someone once complained that students ought not to set aside their studies in order to attend to the arts or go to concerts. It may be an early reading of Emerson talking, but I rather think transcendent experiences are to be encouraged. Besides, some forms of music are lessons in themselves and so of greater intrinsic value than all the tiresome and ill-written textbooks now in existence. I mean, to compare a Bach contata with some millennia old lecture notes (read: Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia) is patently absurd.