John Sparrow was the brilliant, eccentric warden of All Soul's, Oxford and friend of, amongst others, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, Harold Nicolson. This is his authorised biography.

John Sparrow was a scholarship boy from Wolverhampton and one of the cleverest men of his generation - a classical scholar, lawyer, essayist and connoisseur. Warden of All Souls', Oxford for over 25 years, he became post-war Oxford's most celebrated eccentric, homosexual intellectuals with an undying love for poetry and an acerbic wit and style.

John Lowe knew Sparrow for well over 40 years and has been given exclusive and unrestricted access to the treasure-trove of Sparrow's papers which include unpublished letters from John Betjeman, as well the complete correspondence between Sparrow and his mother, letters from Harold Nicolson, Edith Sitwell, Kenneth Clark, Maurice Bowra, James Pope-Hennessey, etc... All the defining moments of Sparrow's life are here - his time as one of London's cleverest young barristers, his delight in airing unorthodox opinions, his controversial election to the Wardenship of All Souls', his homosexuality, his alcoholism on retirement, his love of books and book collecting, his own writing and reputation as the last great English essayist.

Lowe also sees Sparrow as a symbol of the successes and failures of post-war Oxford and its reluctance to look into the future and re-address its role in British education.

'Here, with his talents in a napkin hid,

Lies one who much designed, and nothing did;

Postponing and deferring, day by day,

He quite procrastinated life away,

And, when at length the summons came to die,

With his last breath put off - mortality.'

This epitaph John Sparrow wrote for himself - a joke at his own expense. In many ways, his story is a story of failure, of the many problems faced by those who are found to be very clever very young. It is an extraordinary account of an extraordinary man.