“... of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential multi-volume Oxford History of England (1934-65). The aim of the new series, Roberts declared, was to ‘give ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1934, after finishing her English degree at Oxford, Barbara Pym drafted a comic novel. Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons ...”

“... Wimsey are common, but Sayers’s structural achievement in Gaudy Night, her novel of manners and Oxford, has not been well understood. Modern detective fiction may be schematically divided, pace Binyon, into stories of the professional (police) and the amateur: the categories correspond approximately to Symons’s ‘crime novel’ and ‘detective ...”

“... nearest I have come to war was in 1940, when I and other members of the Home Guard patrolled round Oxford gas works. We foresaw with a flash of strategical penetration that the entire German parachute force would land on Oxford, if only because Oxford was supposed to be in those days a ...”

“... being born a bit too early. In short, there was nothing much in the education of this essentially Oxford group of poets that made it hard for them to flourish under the new Toryism. By 1951, they were already fed up with their little suburban houses and rotten pay. I remember my surprise when John Wain told me he intended to vote Conservative in the 1951 ...”

“... next to no knowledge of life outside politics. He is also yet another humanities graduate from Oxford in his forties. That means that out of the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, the leader of the opposition and the shadow chancellor, the only one of them who is not a white man in his forties with a humanities ...”

“... The day before Remembrance Sunday the people in Oxford Street told themselves to remember there were fewer than 50 shopping days until Christmas. Even in our down times, London is a formidable shopping Mecca: the people who weren’t in Oxford Street that day were possibly at the new Westfield Stratford City, a shopping mall the size of a small invadeable country, where even the security guards were impressed by the military effort being put into the laying of a red carpet for the premiere of the movie The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One, for which fans, or Twihards, as we fans like to say, started queuing three days early ...”

“... The architecture, in its variety, attests to changes made long ago. The thoroughfare of New Oxford Street sliced through the St Giles slums, the infamous rookeries, in 1847, joining the West End to the City. Here the streets retain a few Georgian houses from the days when Bloomsbury was first fashionable: the five-storeyed pastel buildings of Museum ...”

“... It was, in other words, a classic example of Mid-Victorian taste. This volume in the New Oxford History of England is a fitting tribute to the qualities of that cabinet. Which is not to say that we should compare the author’s craftsmanship to that of Messrs Wright and Mansfield (though there are similarities). Rather, this is a book that celebrates ...”

“... ancestry, I should declare an interest: I was a postdoctoral research associate in Bryan Sykes’s Oxford laboratory in the late 1980s. When I joined it in 1987, his team was working on inherited conditions such as osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, but my project was an attempt to recover DNA from archaeological bones, something that had not ...”

“... only to convert back to Catholicism in 1876. Each time this led to a change of scene: in 1847 from Oxford and London to New Zealand; in 1856 from New Zealand to Dublin and then Birmingham; in 1865 back to Oxford; in 1876 to London again and then Dublin. And, worse, with each shift came the risk of family betrayal: at first ...”

“... a poem published in New Verse when he was still at school. But he was also represented in Eight Oxford Poets (1941), a supposedly key selection of the time, in which one of the editors, Sidney Keyes, apologised for the ‘over-floridity’ of his contributors, explaining that ‘we have on the whole little sympathy with the Audenian school of ...”

“... on this fugitive self-doubt, that Tynan rises to convincing nastiness: ‘You have never been to Oxford and as far as I know, you have no close acquaintance amongst Oxford men,’ he tells Holland, after Holland has dared to comment adversely on Tynan’s criticism of Romeo and Juliet. ‘To talk of “...”

“... pointed out how much effort at self-reform went on in the early Victorian period. Work on Oxford networks has brought out the importance of the Oriel College Noetics, of which Thomas Arnold was the principal luminary. Other writings have dealt with student movements and the revival of classics, mathematics and theology. Perpetual interest in ...”

“... literature and life (or my life at any rate) were different things. For the time being, anyway. At Oxford I was sure it would be another story. So to Oxford I duly went, changing stations at Sheffield and probably taking for a trainspotter that balding man at the end of the platform eating a pie. That I had still not ...”