Brasenose College, Oxford - Fictional Brasenose

Fictional Brasenose

• Brasenose College is featured as Lonsdale College in the Inspector Morse novels and television adaptations. It appears both as Brazenface College and under its own name in Cuthbert Bede's 19th century comic novel Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman.

• Parts of the novel Doomsday Book by Connie Willis take place in a not-too-distant Brasenose College.

• In The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett a reference is made to "those bastards over at Braseneck College", probably a parody of Brasenose.

• Thomas Love Peacock in his novel Crotchet Castle (1831) has one of his characters say: 'the Friar is gone, and his learning with him. Nothing of him is left but the immortal nose, which, when his brazen head had tumbled to pieces, crying "Time's Past," was the only palpable fragment among its minutely pulverised atoms, and which is still resplendent over the portals of its cognominal college. That nose, sir, is the only thing to which I shall take off my hat, in all this Babylon of buried literature.'

• Mentioned in the Renaissance play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Robert Greene (dramatist).

• Brasenose is also mentioned in Chapter 5 of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, where the "pub-crawlies hearties from BNC" were noted as frequenting the Turf tavern.

• Brasenose is mentioned several times in Middlemarch by George Elliott. The character Mr Casaubon is fearful about how the 'leading minds of Brasenose' will react to his (never completed) 'Key to all Mythologies'.