Politics & Power Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Oxford gets reduced to a holding pen, and the insult is dressed up as travel writing. Waugh’s line performs a neat double move: it flatters the city’s undeniable aesthetic pull, then punctures the romance with a bureaucrat’s verb, “segregate.” That word is the tell. It drags the idyll into the realm of social engineering, implying the university exists less to enlighten than to sort, quarantine, and polish the nation’s future rulers away from the mess of ordinary life.

The intent is classic Waugh: weaponized elegance. He isn’t arguing that Oxford fails at teaching; he’s suggesting its deeper function is to manage class reproduction. “Convenient” makes the whole enterprise sound like infrastructure, as if elite formation were a matter of efficient logistics: remove the young, surround them with beauty, tradition, and rituals, let them ferment into the right accents and assumptions. The city becomes a stage set for a national performance, where culture substitutes for accountability and refinement stands in for merit.

Context matters. Waugh, a satirist who knew this world from the inside, wrote in an England anxious about modernity, mass politics, and the fraying legitimacy of old institutions. His cynicism lands because it’s observational, not abstract: Oxford as picturesque sequestration captures how privilege often presents itself as education. The line still stings because it spots the quiet bargain at the heart of elite campuses: insulation marketed as opportunity.