1. I have covered some ground: Chesterton, Histon, Waterbeach,
and Oakington have each been explored, and have each proved
disappointing.

Identified correctly by all who attempted this question. It is from
Conan Doyle's "The missing three-quarter" which has been used as
evidence that Holmes never went to Cambridge. It may at least be
evidence that he never did the March March march.


2. I might have simply sat and snored --
   I rose politely in the club
   And said: "I feel a little bored;
   Will someone take me to a pub?"

G.K. Chesterton's "Ballad of an anti-puritan".  Again easily
identified by many people and the only wrong guess was Belloc, who is
almost a right guess.

3. Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
   And pause awhile from letters to be wise;
   There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
   Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

By Sam Johnson.  It might have been Cowper (someone thought).

4. The competition was so keen that at last mere money payments
were not enough. Any College, that wished to secure some
especially clever young man, had to waylay him at the station,
and hunt him through the streets. The first who touched him was
allowed to have him.

Nobody got anywhere near this. It is not Tom Sharpe, nor is it Jan
Morris's Oxford, nor is it Zuleika in Oxford, C.P. Snow or even
Margery Allingham. It is by Lewis Carroll: Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,
no less, and it is the Other Professor talking.

5. Mrs Thatcher, a poor old woman who had been too busy all her
life to have had time to develop an intelligence, was obstinately
mystified.

This was the obscurest, being from Margery Allingham's "The case of
the late pig". The dramatization on TV the previous night did not
actually refer to Mrs Thatcher for some reason. It was not Mark Twain,
nor Meredith, nor Gissing, as those hazarding the names probably
suspected.

6. I stood and stared; he saw me and stared back;
   Then with his hands wrenched open his own breast,
   Crying: "see how I rend myself! what rack
   Mangles Mahomet! Weeping without rest
   Ali before me goes, his whole face slit
   By one great stroke upward from chin to crest."

From Dante's Hell (or Inferno, if you prefer), translated by Dorothy
L. Sayers. Not one of the Satanic Verses, but the cause of a bomb
threat on Dante's tomb, someone claimed.

7. I have several titles which for the moment escape me. Baron
Llffthwchl am I, and ... and ... but you can find them for
yourself in Debrett. In me you behold a Prince of the Holy Roman
Empire, and a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Look
well at me! I am Hereditary Comber of the Queen's Lap-Dogs.

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm. Read it if you haven't. Some had.

8. I asked my dear friend, Orator Prigg,
   'What's the first part of oratory?' He said 'A great wig.'
   'And what is the second?' Then dancing a jig
   And bowing profoundly he said, 'A great wig.'
   'And what is the third?' Then he snored like a pig,
   And puffing his cheeks he replied 'A great wig.'

Eventually identified as William Blake in highly uncharacteristic
style. Lots of wrong guesses, such as Lear, Belloc, Peacock, Swift,
Goldsmith, Arnold.

9. It was now about half past ten at night and the trains were
getting fewer and fewer and the empty station seemed emptier and
darker so that he almost welcomed the oncoming rumble of those
cruel trains which still rushed past. They were at any rate
kinder than the dreadful silence in the station when they had
gone away and he could imagine huge hairy spiders or reptiles in
the dark passages by which he had so vainly tried to make his
escape...

A frivolous guess (of Betjeman) was in fact correct. You would get
bonus marks for identifying the station as South Kentish Town (see a
book entitled "Betjeman on London" for the full story), but nobody
did.

10. ... And then we stroll'd
    For half the day thro' stately theatres
    Bench'd crescent-wise. In each we sat, we heard
    The grave Professor ...

    Till like three horses that have broken fence
    And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn,
    We issued gorged with knowledge...

Not a report on Maths lectures, but from Tennyson's "the Princess".
This is the poem on which "Princess Ida" is based.