At High Table in Oxford college, the pretty, young tutor Clare Bayes attracted all eyes, not least to her fetching décolletage. No one's eyes were sharper, however, than those of the visiting Spanish lecturer, invited as a guest on this occasion, and in due course the two young people were lovers, unbeknown to Clare's husband. In a city where 'simply being is far more important than doing or even acting' the narrator finds a community immersed in gossip, one-upmanship, lust and loneliness and soon begins to find the spirit of Oxford affecting even him. With crystalline observations and brilliantly funny set pieces All Souls perfectly captures the drifting rhythms of academic life.