Voyages of discovery

Roger Louis is an American professor from the University of Texas at Austin who knows more about the history of the British Empire than any other two academics put together. When the Oxford University Press embarked on its mammoth history of the Empire the general editor they chose —to the chagrin of certain professors from the Commonwealth — was Roger Louis. Among his other responsibilities is the British Studies seminar, which was founded at Austin 36 years ago.

But Professor Louis is not the university’s only attraction. The Harry Ransom Center houses one of the most, if not the most, important collection of modern literary manuscripts in the English-speaking world. If you want to study Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh or John Fowles, Tom Stoppard or Penelope Lively, then you will have to go to Austin. The result is that there is rarely a time when some distinguished writer or scholar is not to be found visiting the campus. And few escape without being recruited by Roger Louis to lecture to his seminar.

The results were too good to be confined to so small an audience. In 1995 Roger Louis drew together a first tranche of lectures in a volume called Adventures with Britannia. It was an immediate success and was followed by More Adventures with Britannia, Still More Adventures with Britannia, Yet More Adventures with Britannia, then, with increasing desperation, Penultimate Adventures with Britannia, Ultimate Adventures with Britannia, and, in this latest manifestation — reminiscent of the traditional hero who is tied up, gagged and deposited in a capsule several hundred feet down in a shark-infested sea: ‘With one bound he was free’ — Resurgent Adventures with Britannia.  

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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

Most of the lectures fall loosely under the headings of literature or history, though some are harder to categorise: Steven Isenberg’s splendidly self-indulgent description of lunches with W.