Published by Blackwell's 47pp
edited by Martin Starkie, Roy Macnab
with Introduction by Lord David Cecil.

Unique among Blackwell's editions in having a biographical index, revealing that of the 23 contributors 12 had served as officers in the war, and 2 as sergeants. Showing its mixed blood, so to speak, in being the old Blackwell's-style volume allied with the two OP pamphlets of 1946, this volume bears a heraldic cover device divided as the Oxford University crest on the left and a hand and star of David on the right. Whatever this signified, it did not appear again. Lord David Cecil, who seldom missed an opportunity to pose as an aesthete, praised the earlier look of OP in terms reminiscent of the celebrated blue lily vase which was the only adornment of Oscar Wilde's undergraduate rooms at Magdalen: "Within its elegant blue and white covers the successive literary fashions lie enshrined, ready for the future historian to examine." (It was for examining and failing the graduate degree of Kingsley Amis, editor two years later, that he was much maligned in the latter's Memoirs.)

Contents

Lord David Cecil: Introduction;

Ian Bancroft: Bridge on the Orne, 1944; Funeral;

Arthur Boyars: Contemporary Manners;

M. L. Burchnall: Future;

Guy Butler: Winter Solstice; Syrian Spring;

H. T. Corke: Byron;

Ian Davie: A Prologue;

Ann Davis: Bestiary; Sweet Helen;

Hugh Fletcher: June 6th, 1944;

Hilary Froomberg: The Carol of the Peacock and the Pelican;

Patrick Gardiner: Napoleon at St. Helena; Tennyson;

Roger Lancelyn Green: Fairy Song from "Thomas of Erildoune";

J. D. James: To the Virgins to make much of Time;

Derek Jewell: Humoresque;

Francis King: From a Greek Frieze; The Harp;

Michael Lloyd: The Birds; To Poins;

Roy Macnab: Blind Kings; The Lost Minister (In Memory of Lord Aberdeen);

Michael Meyer: Christ Church Meadows at Martinmas;

Kenneth Robinson: Occupation;

Gordon Swaine: Turgeniev; In Memory of Mistress Katharine Ryche;

John Wain: What are the Woes?;

Philip Warner: Mobility; Novitiate;

Terence Walton: For Ariadne; A Poet at Thirty (from the French of Jean Cocteau);

Jean Cocteau: A Poet at Thirty [translated Terence Walton];