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Rating: 
Summary: Very enjoyable
Review: I read this book over 5 years ago and remember enyoying it quite a bit. It paints a certain portrait of Oxford and contains many interesting stories. Having graduated from Oxford in 1997, my experience was very different from his and perhaps not as positive. However, I take issue with the other reviewer who disliked the book- of course different individuals are going to have different experiences. Mehta went to Oxford over 40 years ago and clearly during all this time, the university has changed. Regardless of the other viewer's negative experience at Oxford, I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Bewitched by Oxford
Review: I read Ved Mehta's Oxford memoir while I was a foreign grad student at Balliol, where he had been a student. That explains my overwhelmingly negative reaction to it. Granted, by the time I arrived in the 1990s both Balliol and Oxford had fallen far from the heights they reached in Mehta's day, particularly the former. But I found his glowing, even reverential, account of Oxford utterly one-sided and infuriatingly uncritical. Actually, nauseating is the best word to describe his portrait of Oxford. He admits that he had been in awe of the place since childhood, like so many people from former British colonies (I'm a "colonial" too). But having been there, he should have seen through the image to the often quite sordid reality that underlies it. The impression he gives is that he is hugely impressed that he went there, and you should be too. He describes how charmed and delighted he was by the SOCIAL life of Oxford, and by its traditions and history and general "gaiety". He appears to have loved hob-nobbing with the "Brideshead" types and sipping cherry with the dons and playing croquet in the college quad. Yet he says very little about it as a SCHOLARLY institution. It is a university, after all. Therein lies the essential problem: too many people are drawn to it for the wrong reasons. They are bewitched by Oxford as a social institution, a place at the heart of the British class system that many people who suffer from acute status anxiety find so fascinating. Alas, it lures people with such neurotic social hang-ups from every corner of the planet who admire the intricacies and social elitism of the British class system, which has been honed to perfection by centuries of revolution-free development. If they can make it there, they seem to think, they can make it anywhere! (The worst snob I met in 4 years "up at Oxford" wasn't English--he was Australian!) That's why there are so many obnoxious, slavish Anglophiles about the place. Some, like me, are repulsed by it and become Anglophobes. (Not quite what Rhodes had in mind with his Trust!) Others, like Mehta, never see past the glittering exterior. There's something faintly sad about that. When I finished Mehta's book, I felt a slight touch of pity for the man. He was there and he's had a lifetime to reflect on it and still hasn't figured it out.If you are an Anglophile who wants an uncritical "insider's view" of the imaginary Oxford (the "dreaming spires" view), then Mehta's will please you greatly. But if you want a thinking person's view of Oxford from a contemporary perspective--one that rips off the veil and exposes it as an ugly, anti-intellectual fraud rife with snobbery, greed and hypocrisy--then you are much better off with Rosa Ehrenreich's "A Garden of Paper Flowers".
Rating:
Summary: Up at Oxford
Review: This account of Mehta's years at Oxford focuses on the depth of the upper class English education, and on the fragility of the young men who survive it. Although Mehta doesn't dwell on his blindness, there is a strong unspoken contrast between his own physical and spiritual courage and resourcefulness and the narrow intellectual pursuits of his peers. Best for me was the tenderness with which he recalled his parents' experiences in England while he was at Oxford.
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