Dropping in on Robin Lane Fox, Britain's most quixotic newspaper columnist.
Robin Lane Fox’s reputation precedes him.
He’s a storied academic and the world’s longest-standing gardening columnist with 55 years and counting at the Financial Times. Whispers of the man’s exploits have long been exchanged in the Oxford cloisters, where generations of students have hoped to catch a glimpse of the fabled professor.
Professor Lane Fox, extraordinary lecturer in ancient history, to give him just one of his official titles, is said to have given lectures on Alexander the Great in the first person. Some insinuate that he believes himself to be a reincarnation of the man.
Others say he traded his historical expertise for a place in a Hollywood cavalry charge against armoured elephants, perched atop a horse named Gladiator.
‘I’ve heard,’ one Ivy League classicist confides, ‘that once his jacket began smoking during a talk due to an improperly extinguished pipe.’
He also despises garden gnomes.
Lane Fox, garden fellow, to give him another of his titles, is as close to the platonic ideal of an eccentric Oxbridge academic as one can be. And given how endangered they are these days, it’s perhaps no surprise how elusive he is.
Making contact is a challenge. Emailing is a dead end. Calling? Forget about it, there are no mobile phones in Lane Fox’s world, and good luck getting hold of the landline.
A partial explanation comes with a call to New College lodge.
‘Well, if you know Robin,’ the porter reveals, ‘you won’t be surprised to hear that he’s hurt himself climbing on the furniture in the library.’
I persist in sending well wishes, choosing to believe that bruised ribs explain the radio silence, rather than concede that my Liverpudlian charm might have finally found an immutable opponent.
It had not. A few weeks later, I’m loitering outside the porter’s lodge under stern instructions not to be late: ‘We will wait ten minutes if you are late and will then go off.’ Exactly on the hour, a willowy figure emerges and cuts across the college in my direction. It’s hard to comprehend that this is not a mirage but the man himself.
Introductions are brief. Then the professor swiftly turns and picks out a route through the college gardens that he has managed for years. The drought, I am informed, has taken a serious toll on the roses this year.
The tour comes to a conclusion in the senior common room, a typically inaccessible prize for the layperson, hidden deep in the bowels of the college. Centuries of Oxonians look down on us from their oil paintings as Robin passes me a cup and saucer proudly embossed with the New College coat of arms.
‘I see myself as a classical building with a strong pillared façade,’ Robin begins, drawing back the curtain on his own mythology as he settles into an ancient chair.
‘Not,’ he continues, ‘by Quinlan Terry. Far better than that. Many people may have tried to pull down the façade and demolish the building, but they haven’t succeeded – and over the years I’ve added extras. I’ve got classical wings on either side and a few temples in the garden.
‘I am entirely accepting of this development.’
Now in his eighth decade, self-proclaimed s his best thanks to an ‘enhanced mental ability’, he is an emeritus fellow at New College. He no longer teaches but still tends to the gardens and spends time musing on the particularities of Greco-Roman antiquity, from the Homeric origins of medicine to the transgressions and confessions of 4th-century saints.
Asking ‘who is Robin Lane Fox?’ to the subject of that question while sequestered in the deepest reaches of the university yields two hours covering: geranium cuttings, family lore, fox hunting, the state of the academy, romantic entanglements, handymen, Brexit, the joys of parenting, Demosthenes’ rhetoric, risk assessments, Dominic Cummings’ historical nous, window boxes, the horrors of the contemporary housing market – and a lengthy detour into the merits of Russian literary criticism.
Years ago, I was told that the best journalists use quotes sparingly. But Robin Lane Fox would surely confound even the most accomplished journalists for the sheer fluidity with which he lets loose banger after banger.
‘There would have been general terror that I might become something not often referred to now: an intellectual snob,’ Robin says of his family’s reception of his school reports sent home from Eton.
‘In my last year, however,’ he continues, ‘I had to face the fact that I was very bright in the head, and I was never going to be like my family, who were just completely brilliant cricketers.’
Forced to contend with such an inconvenient fact, he took up a classics degree at Oxford, but not before sojourning as a working gardener in the botanical gardens of Munich.
He’d grown up with a vast garden and had developed a passion for horticulture that received ‘tremendous encouragement’ from the other Lane Foxes as a respectable counterweight to his less savoury intellectual pursuits.
At prep school, he’d been forced to downsize to a window box and temper his enthusiasm for his secret passion, covertly reading gardening books under the bedsheets in a 45-strong dormitory that has since been condemned as unfit for habitation.
In the end, though, the German episode turned out to be less of a culture shock than the subsequent return.
‘I don’t look on the world like this really,’ he confides, ‘but I’d spent a lot of my life with the labouring classes: Germany, home, the hunting field. We knew all those kinds of people through and through. And I knew the upper classes at Eton. Until Oxford, I’d never met the middle classes.
‘They were a terrible shock… I think I was too.’
As we work through a nondescript coffee, it seems that I’ve caught Robin on a particularly pensive day. Or that I have encouraged a fountain of flowing opinions by providing an enthralled audience. Either way, we take an ahistorical detour into a world in which Lane Fox dedicated himself to banking rather than pedagogy.
‘At that time, I would have been obliged to work in mergers and takeovers,’ he says with complete certainty. ‘That would have meant sacking 20% of the company; I would not have found that easy at all. I’m sure I would have given up.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, one function of business is to employ people – I hope that isn’t rewriting the record,’ he adds swiftly.
Instead, Robin went for a far more achievable career out of university: breezing into a meeting with a top London literary agent with an idea for a book about Alexander the Great and little more, demanding simply that the advance be sufficient for him to marry. He was told to go away and write a synopsis.
‘I smile,’ Robin says, with an impish smile indeed, ‘when I hear stereotypical outsiders alleging that Etonians have a sense of entitlement. I don’t know what they mean, I had no sense of entitlement whatsoever. I thought it would be rather vulgar, and it probably is.’
Nonetheless, a bit of magnetic self-confidence never hurt anyone, and that is something Robin has in spades – even when describing the 1972 book, which was, to use his own words, ‘wildly inaccurate’ with a ‘sort of mania’ about it. It was transformative, catapulting him simultaneously into fame and infamy.
‘It was never mentioned in Oxford. Everybody hated it, quite rightly, probably. But it got the most fantastic press, and it was translated everywhere.’
For all the deviations into enthralling exploits around the world, trying to find out who Robin Lane Fox really is returns one simple answer: a teacher.
At no point is he more animated and inspired than when discussing his students and the primary importance of teaching as an academic, although he was perhaps more gleeful when discussing his role in Oliver Stone’s Alexander.
‘I really threw my heart into teaching. And I knew them – I really knew my pupils as people. I would sometimes say to them, by the end of this, I will know your minds as well as your concubines know your bodies. When I meet them now, I think it was true.’
The value Robin places on the teaching and close student-professor relationships feeds a general horror at the state of the universities.
‘That’s what’s missing in the bureaucratic centrist corporate-driven university model, it’s absolutely ridiculous. They need a massive tearout; the place is absolutely stuffed full of people doing bullshit jobs. That’s what’s wrong.’
Robin himself was inspired by a hungover encounter as a student with Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, the formidable Marxist, classicist and author of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, who he describes as ‘energetic and inspiring, quite extraordinary – a figure of legend, I wanted to be somebody that had that energy’.
He followed suit on the now imperilled career path, joining Worcester College to teach languages in 1973. Half a century later, he’s left alarmed that the ladder has been pulled up – not by those who climbed it, but the incursion of the bureaucrats.
Today, the UK’s universities are in crisis, leaving today’s academics distracted by the necessity of battling it out for fleeting positions with no progression, under incessant pressure to publish, and ever an ‘expense’ to be debated. How is one to cultivate a bit of zaniness under such adverse conditions?
Even so, despite all his enthusiasm for the days gone by of truly respectable British pedagogy, Robin is similarly rapturous about learning in the field – be that, tracing the steps of Macedonian kings in Afghanistan or finally having his French pulled together in his 50s through the time-honoured means of falling in love with a French woman.
‘And she,’ he adds, ‘fell in love with me because of my use of the subjunctive.’
As for his media career?
He’d been inspired by the gardening columns of Vita Sackville-West, a woman about whom he will not tolerate a bad word: ‘people say, oh, well, she was just a sort of oversexed lesbian, an upper-class woman with gardeners. Complete rubbish, she had an eye for it.’
As he narrates it, his efforts to follow suit were aided by some handy contacts (a friend whose family controlled the parent company of the FT) who offered to send some writing samples round the London newspapers.
‘All of whom quite rightly rejected them, as did the FT,’ Robin admits freely. ‘But the managing director there happened to read them and thought there was something to them.’
The editor at the time, Gordon Newton, was instructed to have a look and call the youthful Robin in for an interview despite reportedly finding them unusual, strange even. What ensued can only be dreamed of today.
‘He offered me 20 quid a week to start on a month’s notice. He’d publish them on Wednesdays because the paper was boring in the middle of the week.’
‘And he said, I’ll sack you if they’re no good. So I told him, those flowers on your desk are plastic. I will accept, but you’ll have to pay me 25.’
