COLIN STEELE retreats to the cloisters to review three books of disparate themes – biography, mystery and satire – but all based in academia.

Andrew Robinson has written 20 books, including two previously on Albert Einstein. 

In Einstein in Oxford (Bodleian Library Publishing, $34.99) he narrows his focus, covering the three visits of Einstein to Oxford between 1931 and 1933.

Einstein is the archetypal 20th century image of the scientist. The cover of Einstein in Oxford has him in front of the blackboard delivering a lecture in May 1931 on relativity to highlight his being awarded an honorary doctorate. 

Today that blackboard is the most popular object for visitors in Oxford’s History of Science Museum. The museum’s director, Silke Ackermann, who provides the foreword to Einstein in Oxford, has described the blackboard as “a unique relic of a genius”.

A nice aside to his stay was that Einstein took up residence in the Christ Church College rooms once occupied by Lewis Carroll. Einstein was in another type of scientific wonderland to Carroll.

Robinson provides fascinating vignettes as to Einstein’s involvement in Oxford college life, science and especially his social life through his love of music. 

Musicologist and German-speaking Margaret Deneke took Einstein under her wing with Einstein often playing his violin at musical evenings at Margaret’s North Oxford “Gothic villa” home. Margaret recorded her many conversations with Einstein in her diary, Einstein becoming known “as Miss Deneke’s little man”.

Einstein clearly enjoyed his time in Oxford, and initially considered making Oxford his permanent residence, but the scientific opportunities of America, and the distance from Nazi Germany, led to his taking up an appointment at Princeton University in October 1933.

 Lessons in Crime. Academic Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (British Library, $24.99), brings together 15 short stories, published between 1932 and 1978, many with an Oxbridge academic setting where many of the authors were educated.

Edwards, a renowned anthologist and consultant to the British Library on their classic crime series, provides a lengthy introduction that links the development of the “Golden Age” academic mysteries through to the Oxford TV series of Morse, Lewis and Endeavour.

The stories represent their time dominated by male detectives, while the Oxbridge settings are decidedly class ridden. College servants and local inspectors know their place when Lord Peter Wimsey and Professor Gervase Fen appear on the crime scene.

Nonetheless, when you have authors of the calibre of Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Innes, Michael Gilbert and Edmund Crispin, readers know they are in familiar crime territory. 

Most of the stories involve a criminal act, although not always murder. Jacqueline Wilson’s 1978 story The Boy who Couldn’t Read moves into more modern psychological territory, as an autistic boy wins his battle with a bullying teacher

It may have been a golden age for a privileged few at universities in the 1930s when it was satirised by authors such as Evelyn Waugh. It was a different, but still a golden age, in the expanded universities in the 1960s and 1970s, satirised in novels by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and Tom Sharpe

 The University of Bliss by Julian Stannard (Sagging Meniscus Press, $40.95) reflects a much more depressing contemporary university scene, extrapolating from today’s crisis in higher education institutions with decreased funding and increasing internal and external bureaucracy. And let’s not mention Trump’s attacks on American universities.

Julian Stannard, a Reader in English at the University of Winchester (UK), reflects contemporary concerns in The University of Bliss, an over-the-top dystopian satire set in 2035 Britain.

The narrative follows the arrival of the newly appointed vice chancellor Gladys Nirvana, whose very large salary is based on her expertise in “pure reflectivity”.

Her vice-chancellorship is juxtaposed against the fate of two humanities lecturers as they attempt to resist the increasing bureaucracy, which includes Roxana Grogan, head of the Office of Continuous Improvement, “whose intellectual triumphs included a brace of Wow Techs” .

The Department of Wellbeing ensures that demoralised academics must stroke an increasingly depressed dog. The spiritual needs of the university are overseen by the Lady Bishop Imelda Wellbeloved, pro-vice chancellor, whose non-binary Shih Tzu, is called alternatively Ethelred and Ethel. Wellbeloved’s aim is to replace lecturers with robot dogs installed with the latest teaching software.

Professor Leech, the Dean of Discipline, rigorously monitors electronic communication on campus with lecturers retreating to converse in the unsurveilled “gender-neutral lavatories”. Saffron Fraud OBE, heading the Branding and Marketing Centre, takes his inspiration from Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine.

Stannard falls short of reaching the Tom Sharpe satirical top drawer, his settings being too extreme and his characters too broad brush, but, nonetheless, his frameworks will undoubtedly resonate in academia.