For a man reputed to have been an enormous wit, the former Oxford University Vice-Chancellor (and some say vice promoter) Sir Maurice Bowra bequeathed very few of his bons mots to posterity. Look up ‘Bowra, Maurice, wit’ in the index of Leslie Mitchell’s excellent new biography (OUP, £25) and you will be directed to 18 pages of the book. A number of these, however, are concerned with things he didn’t actually say (the famous remark about being recognised at Oxford by his face rather than his private parts, for instance) and where examples of his wise-cracking are given, these prove to be pretty puerile stuff.

The latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations accords Bowra but one entry, the spectacularly unfunny “I’m a man more dined against than dining”, which comes from Sir John Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned By Bells. Immediately following comes another gay icon, Boy George, with two. The first is the far funnier (concerning Madonna) “She’s a gay man trapped in a woman’s body”; the second could very easily have been uttered by Sir Maurice himself, except that he probably wouldn’t have been talking to the Sun and, besides, had been dead 11 years by the time of its utterance in 1982.

“Sex has never been an obsession with me,” said Boy George. “It’s just like eating a bag of crisps. Quite nice, but nothing marvellous. Sex is not simply black and white. There is a lot of grey.”

Compare this with a passage from Mitchell’s book: “With age, [Bowra] came to see the demands of sex and the pursuit of love as tiresome. They had always carried the risk of humiliation and ridicule [not to mention for most of Bowra’s life the risk of imprisonment]. Now they were simply boring. The only recourse was to turn the whole nonsense into humour.”

This comes towards the end of a chapter called Sex and Sexuality. In it is advanced the author’s (and others’) theory that Bowra was predominantly gay but with some interest in women, including the Countess of Longford, as she was to become, and Anne Fleming.

Rampant action with the lads was largely confined, as with a number of gays of his generation, to the louche bars of pre-war Germany; later, terrified of public exposure, he remained firmly in the closet. His pretence at a fully butch persona led to some rather curious behaviour. Frightened of being linked with the notoriously homosexual Andre Gide, for instance, he kept well away (even though vice-chancellor) when the French writer was in Oxford to receive an honorary degree from the University. “Who is this Maurice Bowra that everybody asks me have I met?” pleaded the baffled Gide.

I was delighted to be invited last week to Wadham College, where Bowra ruled as Warden for so long, for the celebration to launch the new biography. This was held (fascinating to see them) in the Warden’s Lodgings, where the present incumbent, Sir Neil Chalmers, was unwell upstairs.

Among those I met there was the playwright (best known for Another Country) Julian Mitchell who had the distinction, if that’s the word, of being given a place at the college solely on the say-so of Bowra who, incredibly, had this autocratic power until it was wrested from him. (“Pure old boys’ network,” Mitchell told me. “Bowra knew my parents.”) All present agreed, however, that Mitchell had given the practice a good name, having earned himself a first there.

Mitchell is also the writer of episodes of TV’s Inspector Morse. I wish I had met him two days later, then I could have told him of a discovery I made in a book by Bowra’s contemporary A. L. Rowse, which I read over the weekend. It was that the two prize fellows admitted to All Souls in 1953 were called Morse and Lewis.

Strange but true.