Zuleika Dobson

Oxford in one fatal summer term. A conjuror of dazzling beauty arrives to stay with her grandfather, the head of a college Beerbohm invents but sets in a city he keeps exact, and every undergraduate falls hopelessly in love. The map runs from the colleges of the High to the Sheldonian and Broad Street, then down through Christ Church Meadow to the Isis, where the young men drown themselves during Eights Week. It brings Oxford into the atlas.

Zuleika Dobson

Judas College (the Oxford colleges)

Chapter 2

Zuleika arrives to stay with her grandfather, the Warden of Judas, and the college dinner that first night sets the catastrophe going: the Duke of Dorset and the whole undergraduate body fall for her at once. Beerbohm keeps the city precise while inventing the college, so Judas stands in for the gated quadrangles and hall dinners of the real Oxford colleges.

Chapter 2

inspired by Judas College is Beerbohm's invention, the college whose Warden is Zuleika's grandfather and where she lodges. There is no Judas at Oxford, so this marks a representative point among the old riverside colleges off the High, near Merton and Christ Church, the milieu the fictional college belongs to.

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Zuleika Dobson

The Sheldonian and the Emperors' heads

Chapter 2

As Zuleika drives into Oxford, the carved heads that guard the Sheldonian break out in a cold sweat, an omen of the ruin she brings. The busts are a genuine Oxford landmark, and it is Beerbohm's book that made everyone call them the Caesars or Emperors; here the city's own stone recoils at her arrival.

Chapter 2

explicit The row of stone busts outside the Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street is real; it was Beerbohm's novel that fixed the popular name 'the Emperors' on them. The coordinates mark the Sheldonian.

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