It is now a given of Northern Ireland issues that mainlanders cannot be expected to understand them. (Arguably, it was ever thus.) So we know that late on Monday night the DUP was finally persuaded to take part in governing Northern Ireland after a two-year gap, but we still do not really know what it will involve. The agreement is treated by most London-based media as good news, because that is always how any concession by Unionists is treated. Boredom and obscurity allow the case of Northern Ireland to be used by our main political parties, officialdom, the Republic, the EU and the US administration as the exemplar of virtue. Having established the untruth (the opposite of the truth, in fact) that Brexiteers wanted a ‘hard border’ between North and South, these forces have combined to use the North as the means to weaken Brexit as a whole. Expect Sir Keir Starmer and his nationalist Northern Irish chief of staff, Sue Gray, to propose, if in government, an exciting new constitutional settlement for the entire United Kingdom, invoking the Good Friday Agreement.

Professor Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, is a respected figure, partly because she is, as she puts it, ‘made in Oxford’. This makes a change from many current vice-chancellors, who more resemble itinerant, highly paid CEOs of global PLCs than rooted scholars. Professor Tracey was born in Oxford, educated near or in it and has spent her career there, apart from a short period in Harvard. She therefore understands loyalty and is well placed to appeal to graduates of all universities to donate to their alma mater. If they do not ‘give back’, she says, universities will fall apart. This appeal is heartfelt, but the vice-chancellor does need to understand why alumni of our greatest universities might be reluctant. The ones with the most money to offer are still predominantly male, ex-independent school and white. The current policies of their universities often assail these characteristics, actively blocking their children and grandchildren from gaining entry, even attacking whiteness itself. Quite often, alumni see deceased benefactors being traduced for allegedly bad deeds and efforts being made to remove their monuments or efface their memory. Objects donated by benefactors are sometimes the victims of ‘restitution’ to their places of origin, without the authorities finding any rightful owner. Curriculums are ‘decolonised’. If you think your university likes nothing about you but your money, why pay up? All reasonable alumni want to help new entrants from different backgrounds enjoy the liberal education which they cherished in their time. But if their institutions are weakening the very idea of a liberal education, they are less likely to dig liberally into their pockets.

A not completely unrelated point is that the people now most likely – apart from Islamists – to abuse Jews in western streets are the beneficiaries of that liberal education whose decline we are witnessing. Watch the recent news-clip of mourners emerging from the Temple Emanu-el synagogue in New York after Henry Kissinger’s memorial service. They are immediately beset by well-dressed, well-educated-looking young white persons, wearing chic keffiyehs, who shriek ‘war criminals’ at them and then pursue them down the street shouting that they will ‘burn their f***ing houses down’. It is lucky Kissinger could not see this. He remembered being thus harassed, in his Bavarian childhood, by the Hitler Youth. Ninety years later comes the same rough beast, this time with a Master’s degree.

For some years, N.M. Gwynne has been teaching thousands. In 2013, his Gwynne’s Grammar was no. 1 in the bestseller lists. Then came Gwynne’s Latin and many more. Now we have Gwynne on the Writing of Verse and Poetry. Mr Gwynne tells me that, because of educational changes, ‘the majority of the adults who think they are poets… and are recognised as poets, do not even realise that scansion is part of poetry’. I must say I doubt that, but I expect he is right that most readers of poetry no longer know what scansion is and consequently cannot enjoy the full riches of English poetry – or of Latin and Greek poetry, which was how, rather than through English, scansion was originally taught in British schools. I remember being made, aged 12, to translate Herrick’s ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ into Latin verse by a dear old clergyman. It now seems incredible that such a thing was ever attempted, although one younger living practitioner is the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, whom I once commissioned to write a Latin ode in the Daily Telegraph for the late Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Anyway, Mr Gwynne is making up for the time others have lost. In his new work, he produces what he calls ‘doctored’ versions of famous poems, italicising where the stresses fall so that people may learn how to read them: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.’ It is a grave loss that such knowledge has fallen out of use, since it is poetry, not prose, which is primary. It is as if no one knew how to read music.

Oddly enough, the first time it occurred to me that perhaps even educated people do not know how poetry works was at the memorial for the wonderful writer Shiva Naipaul in 1985, which we at The Spectator organised. Martin Amis read out Auden’s ‘Ode on the Death of W.B. Yeats’. I formed the impression that Martin, though a brilliant writer and obviously familiar with the poem on the printed page, did not know how it sounded and therefore did not know it as a poem. (If his friends are reading this, please correct me if I am wrong.) I wonder if the generational break between Kingsley and Martin is roughly where the loss of poetry set in.