Bachelor uncles can be popinjays who wear moustache trainers in bed in order to cut a dash the next day, as in Fellini's Amarcord; or they might take the children aside at Christmas and show them how to trumpet a tune in farts, as in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. In stories like that of Freud's 'Katharina', they interfere with little girls, though for many reasons Freud substituted Katharina's uncle for her father. Perhaps an uncle seemed a more plausible or even acceptable perpetrator. But the kind of bachelor uncle formed in England over the decades by the university ruling that dons should not be married offers a study in psychological and national identity that has no counterpart abroad. He lingered on - still does - though the rambling houses of North Oxford built to accommodate the new families of married fellows stand as monuments to the social changes that inaugurated his decline. His love objects were not usually girls, though John Betjeman, sighing over thighs, caught the authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning.

LRB 4 January 1996 | PDF Download