Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, CH, FBA (/ˈbaʊrə/; 8 April 1898 – 4 July 1971) was an English classical scholar, literary critic and academic, known for his wit.

[9] Bowra's parents went back to China in February 1905, leaving their children in the care of their paternal grandmother, who, having been widowed, lived with her second husband, a clergyman, in Putney.

[18] During his final two years, in the sixth form, Bowra became bored with his school work, acquired sufficient French to read Verlaine and Baudelaire, studied a bilingual edition of Dante's Divina Commedia, and began to learn German.

[13] Bowra maintained a connection with the school in later life, being instrumental in the appointment of Cecil Day-Lewis as a master there and serving on its governing body from 1943 to 1965.

[21] Bowra departed from Beijing in September and on his way home spent three weeks in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as a guest of Robert Wilton.

[3] Bowra was very sociable as an undergraduate, and his circle included Cyril Radcliffe (with whom he shared lodgings),[32] Roy Harrod,[32] Robert Boothby,[26] L. P. Hartley,[26] Lord David Cecil,[26] J.

[33] In 1938 the Wardenship of Wadham fell vacant and Bowra, still the Dean, was elected to the post, keeping it until 1970[3] (when he was succeeded by Stuart Hampshire).

[40][41] The election was held on 5 October 1938,[42] and coincided with the Oxford by-election campaign, in which Bowra lent his support to the anti-appeasement candidate, Sandy Lindsay.

[33] He wrote of the election for the post that "The campaign was very enjoyable and C. S. Lewis was outmanoeuvred so completely that he even failed in the end to be nominated, and I walked over without opposition.

"[45] Bowra spent the academic year 1948–49 at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry[33] and gave the 1955 Andrew Lang lecture.

[46] Bowra was at Harvard when the post of vice-chancellor fell unexpectedly vacant in 1948, on the sudden accidental death of William Stallybrass.

[48] When T. S. R. Boase was indisposed by an eye problem in 1959 Bowra returned to chair the committee[49] and privately remarked that "jokes about his beaux yeux are not thought funny".

[3] His tenure was marked by two achievements:[51] he chaired the committee that produced the Report on Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which resulted in a grant for those purposes from HM Treasury;[51] and he helped to establish the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran.

[52] In his long career as an Oxford don Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues.

Though he was not in any sense religious, Bowra signed the petition (in favour of the Tridentine Catholic Mass) that became informally known as the Agatha Christie indult and regularly attended the Church of England services in his college's chapel.

[58] Bowra was an important champion of Boris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

[60] His friend and literary executor, John Sparrow, once commented that Bowra had cut himself off from posterity "as his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable".

Bowra wrote a satire on John Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented by Princess Margaret with the Duff Cooper Prize on 18 December 1958.

[61] Two poems on Patrick Leigh Fermor were omitted from the book, in deference to their subject's wishes, but were published after his death in the Wadham Gazette in December 2011.

[67] In addition to his Oxford degrees, Bowra received honorary doctorates from the universities of Dublin, Hull, Wales, Harvard, Columbia, St Andrews, Paris and Aix.