‘Betjeman attacks ‘monster’ at the Plain.” No, this newspaper headline has no direct link with the picture on the right, amusing as it might be to imagine the poet giving a pasting to the publisher Robert Maxwell — for who could mistake the looming figure next to the Lord Mayor?

There is, however, a connection between the two. The ‘monster’ referred to by John Betjeman was the Waynflete Building to the east of Magdalen Bridge, and the photograph featuring Mr Maxwell, with his wife Betty, was taken at the opening of his bookshop — called, naturally, Maxwell’s — which occupied a large section of it.

The shop, in more recent years a branch of Threshers, is shortly to become — such is the inexorable spread of supermarkets — another Sainsbury’s. It was during research for an article about this that a colleague unearthed the Maxwell photograph in our library.

But first a few words on Betjeman who, though a Magdalen man — albeit one who didn’t last the course — was scathing in his criticism of his college’s venture into modern architecture.

Addressing the Royal Academy at a Burlington House banquet in 1962 he said of the half-finished Waynflete Building: “It is really terrible. I don’t know what it is. It is not quite modern, it is not old, it is not in scale with anything. The approach to Oxford has been done in for ever, unless they blow it up.”

He added: “ I am sure the best intentions went behind that monster . . . which is going to ruin Oxford for ever.”

For information about the bookshop, I have turned to that invaluable chronicle of all things Maxwellian, the biography produced by his factotum Joe Haines.

He calls it “a grandly ambitious project with a lecture and exhibition room, with separate bookshops for paperbacks, children and teenagers”.

Haines goes on: “It was designed also to be a meeting place and incorporated a coffee house where dons and students could meet on equal terms. It lasted for some eight years but it was the kind of project where Maxwell’s heart ruled his business head. In the end it had to go.”

It was its last manager, Dennis Murphy, who told the story of its closure: “The shop was losing money and I had to advise the Man accordingly. However, sources close to him told me to tread lightly — the bookshop was his pride and joy . . .

“I was ushered into the presence, who was flanked by four or five sombre-looking gents. They were accountants. The Captain was in his most friendly and expansive mood (this is his most dangerous mood — the cobra is about to strike).

“‘Murphy,’ says the Captain, ‘you were wrong in telling me the bookshop was losing X pounds a week. It is losing three times that amount. So it has to close.’ ‘Sir,’ says I, ‘when?’ ‘Now,’ says he. Within half an hour I was back at the bookshop. The doors were closed for ever and I informed the assembled staff of 20 or so that it was all over.”

So, a few more folk who had cause to rue the day they went to work for Cap’n Bob . . .