ABSTRACT
J. I. M. Stewart is the master, but his work is merely the most lustrous thread in a web of writing. C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength inspired J. I. M. Stewart’s The Naylors and Andrew Davies’s A Very Peculiar Practice: The New Frontier. His early lesson learnt, it is Stewart’s tactic in most of his Oxford work from Stop Press onwards. J. I. M. Stewart pokes gentle fun at north Oxford villas: The house in Norham Gardens was large and lofty. ‘Only the large number of moderately ancient and for the most part architecturally unimaginative buildings,’ says J. I. M. Stewart of Oxford, ‘distinguished the place from any other English city of equivalent size.’ In The Aylwins J. I. M. Stewart plays games with Snow’s plot from The Affair. Stewart gives the plot a twist worthy of Michael Innes, that notable farceur; but while celebrating collegiality he also claims to reveal to the reader much more about academic life in Oxford than Snow had revealed for Cambridge.
