Summer Schools: Get on course for a good holiday: From 'Middlemarch' to moral dilemmas, studying for recreation is enjoying a revival. Liz Heron reports

Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been

Cool'd a long age in deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country-green,

Dance and Provencal song and

sun-burnt mirth]

Few people can have such an iron constitution that the first hint of summer - the song of a nightingale, say - has never left them, like the poet John Keats, longing for something better than the routines, worries and problems of everyday life.

Keats, like other cultivated people of his time, fled to Italy for relief from this condition and today the Mediterranean remedy of sun, art treasures and antiquities is within reach of most people. But a growing number of Britons are turning to Keats' poetry itself - or Shakespeare's plays, German opera, archaeology or natural history - for summer-time release from the more soul-destroying aspects of work or family life. Summer schools in a host of such subjects are enjoying a revival at UK universities.

The Oxford University Summer School for Adults, the oldest in Britain, has doubled its student numbers in the past 10 years. The school is strictly for the serious- minded: all students have to submit a 1,500-word essay and cover some of the reading list before they arrive, and the week-long courses are tightly focused. Offered in five blocks from mid-July to mid-August, subjects range from King Lear to Berlioz, from Middlemarch to moral dilemmas.

Karen Hewitt, who has taught on the school for many years, says: 'The preliminary work means you can plunge straight into what you are doing and students assume that it is very important.' The demanding pace carries on throughout the week: there are seminars every morning and students spend the afternoons on a second essay and each have two tutorials.

This year the school will be accredited for the first time and the academic credit that students who pass their assessment will gain also reflects the intensive nature of the courses. A one-week course will carry credit worth one-eighth of the first year of a university course. This could be used towards a degree at another university.

Since 1888, the Oxford Summer School has aimed to bring university education to the general population and the price is kept low. Students study and live at a centre in Oxford that resembles a residential college. Ms Hewitt says the school attracts people who want to use their minds and discuss a common interest with other people.

Students are mostly British but range in age from 18 to 80. Linda Noel, a partner in an Aylesbury accountancy firm, joined her first summer school eight years ago when her children were small. She found it 'liberating' and has returned almost every year since then, taking courses in English and Russian literature. 'It's nice to get away from the financial world. Attending a school is like being a student plus being on holiday. You tend to make friends and at the end you feel that you've got out of your groove and had a fulfilling time,' she says.

Cambridge University, which for many years has run large international summer schools - in British life and culture, English literature, history, and art history - is this year launching a summer school at Madingley Hall, outside Cambridge aimed, like Oxford's, at British adults. The Madingley school will offer six week-long courses in film studies; local and regional history; music; English literature; creative writing; science; and classical civilisations. A new three-week international summer school entirely devoted to the study of Shakespeare will also begin this year.

Other big providers of summer schools include Edinburgh University and Birkbeck College, London, which caters exclusively for mature students. Birkbeck runs two, one in Derbyshire and one in Gloucestershire.

Edinburgh's programme has a strong Scottish slant and three courses directly linked with the Edinburgh Festival are among the most popular. A three-week Festival Arts course aims to enhance students' understanding and appreciation of the festival. Class members attend all the main performances and are given pre-performance seminars on the work of particular playwrights and composers. A more informal course is run for the Fringe Festival and a two-week film studies course ends with students attending the opening gala of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August. They could then stay on and apply their new-found analytical skills at the festival. Reasonably priced accommodation - prized by any festival-goer - is offered to all students in university halls.

Universities have something to offer even to those who cannot face all this midsummer cogitation. Just as one may now have the White Cliffs Experience at Dover, without ever having to ascend the cliff, so one can have the Oxford Experience, without ever having to read a book. This consists of three week- long programmes of courses chosen to reflect 'the interests of adults, regardless of formal educational accomplishment'.

Students stay at Christ Church, dine in its large hall, stroll in its meadows by the Thames and follow a gentle programme of courses such as Oxford College Gardens; Alice in Wonderland and Other Children's Fantasies; The English Country House; and Winston Churchill: A Political Life.

Or for those with tartan tastes there is the St Andrews experience, just one of many special interest courses offered by St Andrews, the oldest of Scotland's universities. This is a series of guided walks around the Fife town exploring its history as the pre-Reformation centre of Scottish Catholicism, as a university town and as the home of golf. St Andrews - ever with an eye on the American market - also runs courses on Royal Renaissance Scotland, Classical Scottish Scenery, and The Magic of Operetta. 'The very word operetta has a romantic ring,' the university's brochure gushes, 'conjuring up visions of hansom cabs and gas lamps and the glittering gowns of ladies as they enter the dimly lit theatre to enjoy a love story accompanied by luscious songs and choruses. But the magic is far greater than that.'

(Photograph omitted)