“... grey but tastes like it could be’. She is on her way to start her postgraduate studies in Oxford and marry her ‘True Love (TL), who has been there for a year’. Eating the airline food is an act not of conformity but of defiance. She is trying to distance herself from the other Asian Ugandans on the flight, the older women who reach in their bags ...”

“... and comfortably moneyed background had set him. From Charterhouse he went to Lincoln College, Oxford to read English, maintaining all the while a steady level of underachievement, sporting and academic. His headmaster’s final report dismissed him as ‘irretrievably gauche’ and he left university with a ‘gentleman’s fourth’, the only ...”

“... and an alexandrine, all on a single rhyme. The judgment on Theophila quoted above comes from The Oxford History of English Literature, which rightly regards Benlowes as representing the giddy limit in 17th-century attempts to write ‘heroic’ poetry in the high metaphysical manner. And this must surely seem an unpromising way to tackle extended argument or ...”

“... plaster. He was also plagued by gouty joints and an adulterous wife. Jane Morris, daughter of an Oxford stablehand, fell with tedious predictability for two of the most notorious seducers of the age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; but her husband seems to have managed the matter well, and this book discerns a (qualified) sexual ...”

“... Pippa and Nicolas’.) His father was a surgeon who settled down to a practice in Oxford. His mother was a housewife with a gift for music and a good ear for poems. Or for rhymes: she schooled her son on nursery songs, and he gradually found his way from A.A. Milne to Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Masefield and Betjeman. Father and mother ...”

“... all manner of discontinuous instrumentalities, and one of these is the aphorism. So John Gross’s Oxford Book of Aphorisms might, if properly used, be less a book to nod over than a neo-philosophical catena, an instance of the edifying that ousts the epistemological. As a matter of fact, it contains some strong anti-systematic remarks. ‘Philosophy, hoping ...”

“... wonders how she was driven to it) makes it safe to assume that she would dislike this new Oxford Book cordially. Her ironical appearance in it follows immediately after that of Arthur Machen. Here the author of The Children of the Pool (1936) gets hot under the collar on the subject of psychoanalysis: From the simplest and most obvious dreams, the ...”

“... emotional and eventually embittered relationship with Adam von Trott. She and von Trott met at Oxford, in the brief deceptive sunshine before the rise of the Nazis; von Trott was to die in 1944, shot for his part in the plot against Hitler. They were part of a circle of young people – Goronwy Rees, Douglas Jay, Isaiah Berlin and others – deeply ...”

“... got stuck in the door, however, which prevented it from slamming properly and in my first year at Oxford I joined the Contemporary Dance Society and was sitting on my bottom, legs apart, on an over-polished wooden floor in Somerville doing ‘contractions’. This was ‘Graham technique’ apparently and it involved a lot of sitting on the floor, flexing ...”

“... and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and ...”

“... and essays, which begins with Michael Howard’s 1981 inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford, and ends with his valedictory in 1989 – all writings firmly historiographical. But one may easily detect the influence of his engagement in the contemporary war/peace debates in Howard’s treatment of the past: he writes of the decisions of 1914 or ...”

“... shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare wielding (well, almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called Edward, is that rare item in the archives of murder, a matricide; he has just ...”

“... second reason is dubious. I agree with Thomas Kinsella’s view, in his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are ...”

“... Cambridge.’ Next page: ‘(Ronald) Timothy Renton (1932-), educated Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford … John Selwyn Gummer (1939-) … King’s School, Rochester … Selwyn College, Cambridge … William Waldegrave (1946-) … Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.’ It goes on and on. A Martian who came across ...”

“... him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your Oxford entrance?Yes.And why Oxford, if you had this raging Leavisite for a teacher?Oh, because my older brother went to Cambridge.He read – what, natural sciences?Medicine, yes. I was not expected to get into ...”