newsBook Review: Homo Neanderthal meets Homo Sapiens at Oxford University
Another World
The Oxford Years
by Melvyn Bragg
(Spectre 2026, 261 pages)
Review by Trevor Grundy
Melvyn Bragg needs no introduction to anyone in Britain who owns a radio.
In his latest book “Another Country -The Oxford Years” the author and broadcaster paints a picture of how, aided by a scholarship, he left his hometown of Wigton in Cumbria to study history at Wadham College, Oxford University, between 1958-1961.
He writes – “When I went through the gates (at Wadham College) I felt that I had arrived in an unthreatening place for work. Centuries of it built to outlast and re-shape all who entered.”
Re-shaped he was. Yet, memories of his childhood in Wigton where he was born in 1939, his time at a local grammar school, first love for a girl called Sarah and parents who watched his rise with contained amazement were never far away.
As described by publisher, Spectre, “over three formative years – as his tutors, his studies and the people around him all expand his horizons and his sense of what is possible – he takes his next steps into adulthood surrounded by the old imposing buildings and libraries of the city of dreaming spires.”
Reviews in Britain have been more than generous. How could they not be? To criticise Melvyn Bragg would be like taking on Paul McCartney, Kate Middleton and Andy Murray all at the same time.
What I find fascinating is the way Bragg takes on himself.
Author Melvyn Bragg
He arrived at Wadham College ambitious and classless. Yet, he admits that when he first met some of the rich, landed and titled inmates at this great university he felt he was Homo Neaderthal to their Homo Sapien.
Says Melanie Reid in her review of this book (The Times, February 28, 2026) – “Amused, detatched, the child of parents devoid of class envy, Bragg observed the alien tribes around him like a paleontologist studying dinosaurs.”
One titled student was asked if he was upset so many working-class people were at Oxford. “Yes” he replied, without a touch of shame in his voice. A landed and titled country person said that Donald Trelford (a future editor of ‘The Observer’) was only at Oxford “because he’s clever.”
What such people said about Bragg, whose father was a publican, we can only guess.
But not all Homo Sapiens were as cruel. Bragg rejoiced and inwardly exclaimed –Three cheers for Homo Wolfers.
Wadham College, Oxford, where Melvyn Bragg found a new world
In her review of this book, Melanie Reid said that the German-Jewish intellectual Michael Wolfers was a flamboyant but mysterious chap who soaked up darkness. She didn’t say much about him other than after Oxford he went on to work for The Times in Africa and that he was probably a spy.
Wow!
Bragg devotes most of chapter five to his friendship with Wolfers. This is part of the book that might interest people who lived in Africa and who came across so many upper-class Oxbridge types who embraced not only the African nationalist cause but applauded or kept quiet as atrocity followed atrocity.
Michael Wolfers at Chatham House in London (Picture: Trevor Grundy)
But, they argued, they were their atrocities, so we had no right to interfere. And if you did, well, you were obviously supporting apartheid in South Africa and all-white rule in Rhodesia.
I will always remember what The Observer correspondent Paul Ellman said when he heard a leading British newspaper had just appointed a new correspondent who had been a pupil at one of England’s most exclusive and expensive schools to war-torn Rhodesia. He yelled out – “God protect me from another fucking Marxist Etonian.”
Bragg remembers Wolfers with affection and describes him as “the most singular person I met at Oxford.” He explains how they met. The college locked down at 1030 pm. Bragg had come back after an Oxford Union debate. He couldn’t get in and to his surprise a ground floor window opened and Wolfers appeared and said -“You can get in this way, if you’d like.” He switched on a bar of the electric fire and giggled. “I’m Michael,” he said. “I know your name. There are biscuits.” Bragg was captivated. The door to a new world opened.
The author says that Wolfers had an intense affectionate manner which he found impossible not to like “although the warmth of it and the self-interruptions of a giggle could raise eyebrows. Soon I was to guess that the giggle was the nervous consequence of a miserably assailed childhood which emerged in fractions of our conversation. I was to understand he had been too deeply hurt too young and even now flinched at the memories. I took to him from the start. We engaged in that cliché of student life – the ‘talking through the night’. He was outstandingly clever.”
Says Reid – ”Bragg writes beautifully about his uncomplicated, loving male friendships, which began randomly by bumping into each other on a shared college stairwell and lasted a lifetime.”
Bumping into one another on a staircase is, I suppose, better than the way Sebastian Flyte met Charles Ryder in ’Brideshead Revisited.’ And how Michael Wolfers reminds me of another exile in the world of the Oxford elite portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in the famous book – Anthony Blanche.
A large part of chapter five is devoted to his growing friendship with Wolfers and a picture is painted of a clever but lonely Jewish intellectual– who was part of Bragg’s life from Wadham College to when Michael Wolfers dropped dead at the author’s 75th birthday party in London in 2014.
What surprised me – no, what shook me to the core – was Bragg’s belief that his great Oxford pal might have been a spy. But who for? M16, Mossad, the KGB, BOSS, the CIA?
Bragg speaks about his great friend’s brilliance at Wadham, his magnificent ability to master African and European languages, including Portuguese and how after Oxford he went to work, for a year, for an English newspaper, meeting working class socialists and embracing their cause.
He went to Africa and represented The Times.
Says Bragg – “He mastered two of the local languages within a few months, more would follow. He moved around the continent. Significantly, when I look back, he was always where the British interest was involved and needed local information. When he returned to London ‘on leave’ we met and he was brimful of the goodness of the people he had met, their gentleness and brilliance. In one posting he had bought a set of football jerseys for a local boys’ team which made him Honorary President. He became an attentive football supporter – this man who had never kicked a football in his life.”
Yes, but that’s what happens in Africa. You meet people but realise only years later that in those days we all wore masks.
The world of Alice in Wonderland is both wonderful and treacherous.
As the late Henry Reuter of the Argus African News Service (AANS) used to say in Nairobi – “It must be good being a people because you meet so many interesting journalists.”
Michael Wolfers entered my life in August 1967 when I was the industrial correspondent for The Times of Zambia based in Kitwe on the Copperbelt.
I remember him in Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s helping organise a protest by a group of expatriate women against the management at the local gymkhana club which banned women from entering certain parts.
Decades later in London he and I would meet for lunch or to attend meetings at Chatham House.
I knew he was an avowed Marxist but a Marxist never far away from the British High Commission.
In London, he told me that one of the advantages of working for The Times was the arrangement it had with British embassies and high commissions to let visiting correspondents take a look at the last three or four letters to London that went off each week in the diplomatic bag. I guess it was to make sure their stories were “accurate.”
At Chatham House, I asked him if he’d read any of the new, very long and rather expensive books written about Africa by London-based Africanists.
He adjusted his tie and gave one of his little boy lost looks and said – “Read them. My dear, I can hardly lift them.”
What could you do but laugh?
Michael Wolfers died at the exclusive men only Garrick Club at Malvyn Bragg’s 75th birthday.
It was there than a friendship of 56 years ended.
After the Jewish Orthodox funeral in Golders Green, Bragg met up with men who knew Wolfers well.
Bragg says that word went round that almost certainly Wolfers had been a spy. Then came a spread in a South African newspaper (we are not told which one or the name of the author) about the strange death of “an English spy” at an exclusive club in London.
Anyone who has worked in Africa as a reporter knows how frequent is the accusation that people you don’t like are spies.
But his great friend Melvyn Bragg insists – ”It made sense. Someone claiming to be a ‘cousin’ of Michael’s came to see me a couple of months afterwards to ask about Michael. He confessed that – in his view – there was no question but that Michael had been a spy. He wanted me to help put together as biography. I refused.”
What a pity no-one has written about the young academics at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s.
Scheming Spies in Dreaming Spires.
As the late journalist (The Observer) Paul Ellman said so poetically when he heard that yet another public schoolboy had been appointed to write about Rhodesia as war drew to a conclusion in 1979 – “God protect me from another fucking Marxist Etonian.”
Melvyn Bragg on graduation day at Oxford University in 1961
Melvyn Bragg never played the spy game. Many did.
He continued working within the British media establishment, achieving so much, so quickly. While all the Homo Sapiens are forgotten, Homo Neanderthal Bragg lives on – a credit to his college, his tutors, his backers, his wife and family but above all to himself.
He edited and presented The South Bank Show from 1977 and hosted the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time from 1998. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society and of the British Academy. Bragg was given a Peerage in 1998 and made a Companion of Honour in 2017.
But at the end of Bragg’s latest, I was left asking but one question – Was Michael Wolfers a spy and if so, who for? And if there is no answer, or need for some kind of follow-up, why mention the possibility and leave the reader confused?
Twelve years after his death shouldn’t someone who knows say?
After all, Wolfers did work in senior positions in the propaganda/media wings of the Mozambique and Angola quasi-Marxist governments after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon.
Will we ever know what these British spooks were up to in Africa? Of course not. Just ask and a safety curtain falls between you and an empty stage.
One thing is certain. Bragg’s “uncomplicated” affection for Michael Wolfers remains. Bragg makes it clear with his final words about Michael Wolfers and a time long ago. He says – “That window into his room at Wadham, forever hard to pass by.”
Sadly, a window is not the only thing Bragg passes by in this memoir about his halcyon days at Oxford University.