Unbelievable, but true: there has never been a biography of Maurice Bowra — warden of Wadham College, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, didactic conversationalist and sumptuous academic — dead almost 40 years.

However, this week, the leading historian and biographer Leslie Mitchell brings out Maurice Bowra: A Life (OUP), thus filling a gaping hole in the intellectual history of the university.

The author was an undergraduate and then junior dean at Wadham in the last years of Bowra’s wardenship in the 1960s, and few would disagree with his summing-up: “Maurice was without doubt the most famous and notorious Oxford don of his generation. To the outside world, he was often mistaken for Oxford.”

Leslie believes that, back in 1919, Oxford virtually created Bowra when he went up to New College to read classics at the age of 21, having fought in the First World War.

“Oxford was the place where someone who had come through the English educational system could become free, in terms of personal development. Maurice detested the public school system which, as he put it, ‘only honours those who went in for repression as a kind of crusade’.”

Bowra took to his college immediately, “acquiring a circle of friends of which he was the dominant figure — directing their reading and careers, getting angry if they rebelled against his authority”.

“He was temperamentally incapable of playing second fiddle”.

The biography has a telling sentence: “If (his) England was a society in which the word intellectual was barely a compliment and in which the word academic was synonymous with irrelevant, most people, by definition, were outside his range.”

The list of those who did come within his range and influence in the 1920s was indeed extraordinary: an inner circle of John Betjeman, Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Clark and John Sparrow, with C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Osbert Lancaster and Cyril Connolly lurking just beyond.

“A quick caveat, though. Anthony Powell, also in that outer ring, once said that Maurice’s company was rather like strychnine, ‘in small doses it’s very therapeutic, but in large doses it can kill you’.”

The crucial theme in Bowra’s life came to him during the First World War.

“Men who survive ghastly experiences like that do so on their own particular terms and they do so by discovering what he repeatedly calls ‘an inner self’ — a sense of self-worth which makes it worthwhile to survive. And he discovered it through poetry, reading Yeats, Elliot and Hardy in the trenches.

“Poetry became totally important to him and he became a crusading educationalist — wanting everybody to discover that which had saved him.”

But there was one chink in the armour. He published widely in his classics areas, but Harold Nicolson wrote, of one of Bowra’s books, that “it was like a man writing luggage labels”.

Leslie puts this surprising weakness down to the influence of one specific tutor at New College.

“Maurice suffered dreadfully at the hands of H.W.B. Joseph — on whose death he opened a bottle of champagne. He was the sort of nitpicking tutor who takes every line of an undergraduate essay and says it’s wrong. This led to a doubt within himself in terms of what he wrote and thus to a caution in later life about what he put down on paper — quite unlike his conversation style, which was brilliant, pyrotechnical stuff.”

There was a huge disappointment for Bowra when he failed to get the Oxford chair of Greek in 1936 (Isaiah Berlin quickly and tellingly wrote to a mutual friend: “For our own sakes, he must become something grand soon”.) and there were rumours that a contributory factor in that decision were stories circulated about his sexuality.

Important, or not, I asked Leslie Mitchell?

“In public life, Bowra was the most robust, vigorous and noisy individual — absolutely certain of what he was doing. But there was one factor that inhibited him. He was almost certainly largely homosexual, but not exclusively, I think. He certainly proposed to three women, and maybe two more — how seriously we cannot tell.”

A couple of years later, he became Wadham’s warden, a position he held until 1970, by which time Mitchell — who saw him at close quarters at this latter stage — believes that the world had left him behind.

But that was another Oxford world entirely, that of administrators rather than academics, of politics not polemical discussion.