A CENTURY AGO THIS SPRING, an Oxford undergraduate got drunk for the first time. After downing three quarters of a bottle of Madeira, a glass of port and two tumblers of cider, he stumbled into Hertford’s Old Quad and decided to show off by reciting a favourite poem. There was just one problem: the young Evelyn Waugh found he only knew the first line.
“There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight,” he solemnly began, followed, perhaps, by a breathless hush from his friends, broken by the odd fetid hiccup, as he
