Waugh said that after affecting world-weary cynicism in his last two school terms at Lancing he was ‘reborn in full youth’ at Oxford. Revelry and deliberate academic idleness left room for a happy, busy life in undergraduate journalism, graphic design, reviewing Union debates, plays and films, and writing profiles and short stories. In the spring term of his second year he unapologetically introduced ‘Our Children's Corner’ into The Isis: ‘We are all of us young at Oxford – (who are wise?) – and do not need a psychology text-book to cause us to yearn once more for the nursery floor’. Playful and generously moralistic, it ran for a term, ending with Uncle Alfred's final valedictory advice to his nephews and nieces to ‘laugh and to preserve […] a sense of humour. You must, of course, never ridicule anything which is good, but it is better to smile good-humouredly at a wicked action than to be resentful.’ In his report of the Union's Centenary debate he singled out one speech for particular praise, identifying stylistic priorities that would characterize him for a lifetime. ‘Every sentence of it had an unexpected form; every epithet was unusual; every argument twisted obliquely from its usual significance or spun inside out.’

His Oxford career culminated in his sitting Finals in June 1924. He had spent most of the previous vacation not revising and between whiles reading ‘Alice in Wonderland. It is an excellent book I think’ (L 9). Not a waste of time: it was to have a marked creative impact on Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and A Handful of Dust. However, ‘as I left the Examination Schools,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I was uneasily aware that the questions had been rather inconvenient’ (ALL 208). His answers were ranked third-class. Discomfited, he went down from Oxford, and back up to London. The next four years of his life followed a continual series of depressing jolts up and down. In the autumn of 1924 he began, full of hope, to study art, only to decide that his life-long artistic ambitions had no foundation. He was frequently drunk.