Literature Gone Wild

Christopher Ricks is playing all sorts of games in his review of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth for The New York Review (probably to give the reader some impression of what McEwan is doing). In the course of his exploits, however, he lands on one gem of a sentence that is so delightful that "sharing with the group" was my immediate reaction:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Oxford University's effortless superiority to Cambridge is nowhere clearer than in the pathetic inability of Cambridge spies to remain undetected.