Seat of learning

Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, £9.99)

Hundreds of books have been written about Oxford, most prompted by the city's reputation across the globe as a historic and architecturally beautiful seat of learning.

My favourite write-ups of Oxford to date have featured chapters on both town and gown - Jan Morris's 1965 guide, Oxford, and Thomas Sharp's Oxford Replanned, from 1948; a forensic, map-laden analysis of town planning.

Cartwright's pocket-sized volume, part of a Bloomsbury series called The Writer and the City, focuses only on the university, but this slightly blinkered viewpoint works to the writer's advantage because his book is only 220 pages long.

The novelist came to Trinity College in the mid-1960s to study politics and returns four decades later to find out how the city - and he - have changed. Cartwright is a very readable writer (one of his recent novels, The Promise of Happiness, was a bestseller) and when I finished this short book I wanted to peruse it again.

He does not allow himself to fall into the trap of penning too learned a tome about what Oxford stands for and what it symbolises.

His theorising is rooted in his own personal journey around the city and the discoveries he makes.

In one of the most amusing episodes, Cartwright subjects himself to a tutorial and doesn't perform as well as he thinks he ought to.

He takes an extensive tour of the Bodleian Library and is lucky enough to be shown some of its treasures, including Kafka's The Castle manuscript.

He recalls how he used to lose his keys and wake his landlady up at night, and weeps, perhaps a little self-indulgently, for his lost youth. Cartwright clearly finds Oxford a fascinating place and has written an engaging book to illuminate his discoveries.

Justin Cartwright will be at Oxford Literary Festival on April 1.