Seamus Perry seeks distraction by reading his favourite essayist

You don’t hear writers praised much for their ‘charm’ these days: it is one of those compliments that is practically the opposite of a compliment.

My grandmother would sometimes say of one of my excellent cousins that he was ‘quite charming’, and meant a very high accolade.

But I cannot imagine any of my current students using the word, except to imply something a bit fishy about a chap’s social proficiency.

But it is the only word that will do for the works of my favourite essayist, Charles Lamb, whose beautiful Essays of Elia (1823) I have been reading again – not engaged in the heroic toil of scholarship, I admit, but more as a distraction from the lingering duties of administration.

Like the poor, these duties seem destined always to be with us.

Lamb’s charm is as far from oily complacency as can be: it is much more rueful and ironising, and his essays are full of a lovely, elegiac awareness of the fragility of things and the human feelings that attend upon them. Do read them.

One of Lamb’s most charming essays is an evocation of Oxford during the long vacation.

Unlike his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lamb didn’t go to university, so he doesn’t feel he really belongs in these precincts as they would.

But he wanders solitarily and plays the part, dressed in black, and imagining himself a scholar or a don.

Visiting Christ Church, naturally, he can settle for nothing less than pretending to be a doctor of divinity.

He drops into the Bodleian, and there seems no difference between the hushed diligent emptiness of the reading room and the city outside: you could hardly imagine a quieter or less peopled place.

“The walks at these times are so much one’s own – the tall trees of Christ’s, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting one to slip in unperceived.”

He wouldn’t find much to recognise in the annual maelstrom of Oxford this summer, I reflected the other day, as an amplified tour guide stood beneath my window and shouted the story of the Oxford Martyrs at a group of distracted, luminously-dressed young people.

I do not claim any expertise in the minutiae of 16th-century religious controversy, but, thanks to the location of my office, I have now heard many versions of the burning of Latimer and Ridley.

Some of them strike me as so wildly off the mark that I wonder at the sheer weight of misinformation that people must carry back home.

One of my more scurrilous students took a job on a touring bus the summer after his finals and, after several weeks, to save his sanity he started to invent a fantastic parallel city for his passengers to learn about.

“And this,” he would say, as they passed the old prison, “is St Lumley’s College, founded by Joanna Lumley.”.

I think Lamb would have enjoyed the comic fantasy in that, even if the crush on the pavement waiting for the bus had got on his nerves.