What Keble Taught Me | Andrew Hunter Murray
Writer and comedian Andrew Hunter Murray (BA English Language and Literature, 2005). Photo by Matt Crockett.
Andrew Hunter Murray spent 14 years as a writer for the BBC panel show QI, and co-hosts the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish. He also writes for Private Eye magazine, and co-founded the Jane Austen-themed improvisational comedy troupe Austentatious. His third novel, A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering, will be published in 2024.
Andrew Hunter Murray (2005 English) writes:
I keep reading that, in a gloomy few years for the humanities, the prospects are particularly bleak for English Literature. Prospective students don’t want to invest three years of time and eye-watering sums of borrowed money in reading and thinking about the greatest works in the world’s most enormous, plastic and vibrantly expressive language. I also read variously that students aren’t convinced it’ll make them a living, and that dons worry their charges now lack the concentration span to read Middlemarch (although to be fair I lacked it too at the age of 18, and only read it aged 32, and even that was lockdown-assisted and a nice break from queueing at the supermarket).
My own life has been profoundly affected by my choice of degree. Not, admittedly, because anyone ever asks about my opinion of Beowulf (cracking) or The Merry Wives of Windsor (dreadful). And not in the enormous structural ways that might be expected; these days I’m a novelist, journalist, and broadcaster, and every day use the analytical skills I picked up at Keble under Sophie Ratcliffe, Diane Purkiss and Ralph Hanna. I’m not even considering the ten years I spent performing in Austentatious, a comedy show set in the world of Jane Austen. Even without the majors, there are countless minor ways in which English degree has helped me. Namely:
1) Over-analysis of other people’s messages. Text, WhatsApp, email, all of it. I am capable of spending twenty minutes over-thinking the placement of commas in a message I’ve received, then spending a further half an hour writing a reply which could have been a one-liner. Even if this doesn’t sound like a benefit, the pleasure of fooling around with words is very cheap entertainment, especially in this economy, and has enjoyably soaked up lots of time I would have otherwise only wasted playing games on my phone.
2) Shelves full of impressive books. It doesn’t matter that I never got through Don Quixote, Moby Dick, or (sorry, Diane) Book V of The Faerie Queene. I have, at various points, owned all the above, and simply having them adds intellectual heft to my living room and vital insulation to the external walls.
3) A large mental lumber room of half-remembered quotes. At a moment’s notice I can very nearly recall lots of quotations and poems, and just trying to remember them has livened up lots of boring evenings at the theatre. You don’t need to look at your watch throughout the very dull musical you’re attending if you’re quietly muttering Tennyson’s Ulysses to yourself.
4) An appreciation that you’re not alone. The 1200-year sweep of an English degree proves to you that people have been grappling with the same questions, fears, hopes and heartbreaks for ever. This is reassuring, particularly when you feel the pressure to do something in an entirely new way – writing a novel, making a pavlova, whatever. You have, effectively, a club of new friends stretching back into the Anglo-Saxon period. Which is useful, because you won’t make any friends at the theatre if you spent it muttering Ulysses.
The above seems rather flippant, although I promise that was intended (benefit #5: being able, I hope, to convey a desired feeling to a reader even at a remove). The truth is that even if it provided nothing else, my degree would have given me three years of something that was my primary aim before and has been since: time to read. I’d pick it again in a heartbeat.
