Charley’s Aunt it is most certainly not – except that Laura Wade’s portrait of Oxford undergraduate life, Posh, is a play set among a similarly nobby set with the Lord Fancourt Babberley of Brandon Thomas’s celebrated farce matched, though not in title, by the likes of James Leighton-Masters, Hugo Fraser-Tyrwhitt, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Harry Hadden-Paton – sorry, those last names are two of the actors, playing respectively Dimitri Mitropoulos and Harry Villiers.

Famously, of course, the satirical drama, being staged at the Royal Court, is based on the antics of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club. You will notice, I am sure, the similarity of the picture on the right, certainly in terms of fancy costume, to the notorious study of the ‘Bullers’, in 1987, featuring the familiar features of David Cameron and Boris Johnson among the members. This picture, curiously, appears to have been taken out of circulation. I wonder why.

Though no stranger to a spot of roistering myself, and at one time an enthusiastic attender of the Bullingdon Club’s annual point-to-point at Kingston Blount, I have yet to see Posh, but I hope to before its run ends on May 22.

I have, however, been eagerly reading the reviews – especially the one this week in The Sunday Times. This was written by Naomi Alderman, whose own contribution – is this a girl thing? – to the cause of presenting Oxford to the world as a centre for young men behaving badly should not be underestimated.

Ms Alderman, who was an undergraduate at Lincoln College, does her bit in a brilliant new novel called The Lessons (Penguin, £12.99). I heard the first chapter or so of it being read on Radio Four’s Book at Bedtime slot by Rory Kinnear – another Oxford graduate, as it happens – and was so gripped that I got a copy of the book the next day.

I loved it, probably because it comes over – is surely intended to – as Brideshead Revisited for the 21st century. That the prose style of Ms Alderman (pictured right) is meticulous, her sense for the mot juste unfaltering, make it possible to praise an attempt at emulation that might otherwise have seemed impertinent.

The Lessons is reminiscent in its way, too, of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. There is a strong homoerotic theme to all three books, and in each case we are in part told the story of a young ‘outsider’ being introduced into a life of gilded pleasure by a companion who has always been on easy familiarity with it.

In The Lessons, the outsider is pretty middle-class student James, the first-person narrator, over whom a spell is cast by the massively rich, and utterly promiscuous, Mark whose ‘Brideshead’ is a decayed Georgian mansion in the unlikely setting of Jericho. Sebastian-like Mark might not have a teddy bear, but he is a tortured Roman Catholic, with a religion-mad aristocratic mum who sets a priest to spy on him.

No room for more. Buy the book and read. I’m sure you will thank me for the tip.