This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Dr Eric Fogey teaches modern English Literature at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges. He is a short, stout man with a red face, luxuriant muttonchop whiskers and an unfortunate habit of seeming to appear many years older than his actual age.

In bad light, or in one of his more extravagant get-ups (the suit of plus-fours, say, in which he can be seen sauntering along King’s Parade, or the corduroy knee-breeches brought to the Vice Chancellor’s garden party), he can sometimes be taken for 45 or even 50. In fact, Dr Fogey is a comparatively youthful 38.

As one who works on the “modern” side, Dr Fogey is naturally compelled to pronounce on authors who are personally distasteful to him — the “frightful” T.S. Eliot, for example, or the “wholly insignificant” Virginia Woolf.

But his real enthusiasm is for the poetry of the 18th century, and in particular the almost entirely forgotten figure — until Dr Fogey set to work on her, that is — of Sophonisba Shadbolt, a Northamptonshire rector’s wife whose collected poems he edited for the University Press, and about whom he produced a lengthy and admiring biography.

Meagre sales have not stopped Dr Fogey, in however modest a way, from becoming a public figure

There were, alas, not many takers for Shadbolt: A Reverie — the TLS reviewer declared herself unimpressed by the subject’s “tormented fustian” — but its meagre sales have not stopped Dr Fogey, in however modest a way, from becoming a public figure.

He reviews prodigiously for the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, the Oldie and other organs, has letters published in the Times about the awfulness of modern architecture, and made a memorable appearance on an edition of Question Time in which he corrected a member of the shadow cabinet on her misuse of the subjunctive.

Dr Fogey’s fans, of whom there are a fair number, were also enchanted by his response to a New Statesman symposium on how its contributors intended to vote at the last election (“I should not presume to advise my Sovereign on his choice of ministers”).

The temptation is to write all this off as a pose. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Dr Fogey genuinely does believe that virtually every enlightened measure of the past 200 years was a mistake and would be acknowledged as such by “the sillies” — his name for anyone who disagrees with him — if only they were true to “human instinct” rather than subscribing to “fashionable cant”.

People who know him only by reputation usually assume him to be unmarried, or homosexual. This, too, would be a mistake, for there is a meek, mild Mrs Fogey and two docile children named Xerxes and Xantippe.

The four of them can sometimes be seen on holiday in Venice, where Dr Fogey walks them through the galleries discoursing gravely on such pictures as catch his eye and asking Xerxes, now a cherubic eleven, if he can define the word “machicolation”.