Spring Meeting 2023

Daisy Dunn will speak on
'Eccentrics, Scholars and Tea at Ellistons: Academic Oxford in the Age of Pym'

Sunday 23 April at 3:00 PM
The University Women's Club
2 Audley Square, London, W1K 1DB

Event plus Afternoon Tea, £47   or   Event only, £25

Join us in the elegant surroundings of the University Women's Club, in the heart of Mayfair, for this illuminating talk followed by a traditional cream tea in the Club Drawing Room. To book, please email us at UKmeeting@barbara-pym.org and indicate how many persons will attend, whether or not you will stay for tea after the event, and if so whether you have any special dietary requirements. We will contact you with payment instructions.

Daisy Dunn is an award-winning classicist and biographer. Born in London, she read Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before gaining a scholarship to the Courtauld for an MA in the History of Art of the Italian Renaissance, and then earning a doctorate in Classics and the History of Art at UCL in 2013. She writes for a number of newspapers and magazines and is editor of ARGO: A Hellenic Review. Her first books, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation, were published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016. Her dual biography, In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, was an Editors' Choice in the New York Times in 2019. Her most recent book is Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars. She lives in London.

'Not Far From Brideshead is teeming with gloriously witty and cruel anecdotes, worthy of the place where an ‘Oxford secret’ is a piece of malicious gossip (usually entirely untrue) that you tell to one person at a time… Dunn, an Oxford woman herself, is clear-eyed about her alma mater’s ineffable charm and glamour, but she is patently aware of its dark side, epitomised so well by another phrase of Arnold’s: "Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"' --Paula Byrne, The Spectator