Lady Lucinda Lambton found “far too much sex and snobbery” in Tricks of Memory, the 1993 memoir by her journalist husband Peregrine Worsthorne. That’s according to the book’s blurb which, in line with usual practice, was probably supplied by the author himself.

Almost certainly, in fact, since the blurb wittily concludes with an answer to Lady Lucy’s complaint: “But that is not necessarily an objection which readers will share.”

“Too right, mate,” as one would never dream of saying to Perry, the most urbane of men. Where sex and snobbery are concerned, I say – in another unWorsthornian phrase – “Bring it on.”

Tricks of Memory – which tells, among much else, of Perry’s gay antics as a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge – was one of two happy discoveries I made in as many minutes at one of the excellent second-hand bookshops in Oxford’s open market.

The other find was Dacre Balsdon’s entertaining guide to our city, Oxford Life, first published in 1957 and here in its revised second edition of 1962.

It was, incidentally, in the first sentence of the preface to this edition that I came across the one semantic infelicity I spotted in the whole book – the use of the word ‘anticipate’ to mean ‘expect’.

I would have expected (sorry) that Balsdon, who taught classics at Exeter College from 1926 to 1969, would have understood the difference.

You anticipate by making preparations for an expected event. As an editor once told me, a woman expects a baby but anticipates the infant by buying a pram.

But back to sex and snobbery...

Oxford Life has plenty of the second, including a story, new to me, concerning Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College between 1885 and 1928 and widely regarded as one of the greatest tufthunters who ever lived.

The diarist James Lees-Milne tells of his admission interview in the late 1920s when his mother equipped him with a list of titled members past and present and told him: “You must pretend they are your relations. He will never find out.” Lees-Milne followed her advice – and was in.

Balsdon writes of Warren’s encounter with “an oriental princeling who blushingly confessed that his name meant ‘Son of God’”. The president airily responded that there were sons of lots of distinguished men in the college.

Sons only, note, for these were the days long before colleges like Magdalen had ‘undergraduettes’, as men like Balsdon (1901-77) were inclined to call them.

A self-styled bachelor don, he lived in Exeter throughout his years of service and believed, probably rightly, that his round-the-clock accessibility to the students was no bad thing.

However, to the modern reader, sentences like the ones that follow will inevitably be read with some suspicion: “The good college don is a man on whom undergraduates have never hesitated to call at any hour.

“And he can have easy informal relations with them. If he comes in from dinner at 11 o’clock at night he can say to whatever undergraduate he happens to meet in the quad, ‘Would you care to come up for a drink and a chat?’.”

Balsdon’s thoughts come from his book Oxford Now and Then, which was published in 1970 as a replacement for the then out-of-print Oxford Life. Delighted by what the first book contained, I rapidly acquired the other through Amazon.

The heady freedoms of the sixties having been experienced by all, Baldson now feels able to talk about sex, even gay sex, if only to seem to deny its existence.

“A vice from which present-day Oxford does not suffer is homosexuality” is the surprising statement at the beginning of a chapter dealing with the reckless decadence of the university in the twenties.

One must suppose that Balsdon means that no suffering now exists where same-sex relationships are concerned. The other reading stretches absurdity to the limits.

Where Balsdon’s own interests lie is obvious in his reference to building workers “magnificently virile in their close-fitting jeans”.