Some of the lectures I attended were superb – I think in particular of Gabriel Turville-Petre’s breathy analyses of the Poetic Edda, for which I’d have paid £90,000 if I’d had the dosh, or Professor Alastair Campbell’s line-by-line analysis of Beowulf, which was like an old-fashioned cinema newsreel. When he’d finished the poem, he went back to the beginning and started again. The lectures weren’t in sync, so it was possible that on day one of the first term of the year, he would be talking about line 1,037.