“... If Christine Brooke-Rose had stayed in Oxford, instead of migrating to France, she might have been rather like Helen Gardner. Her new book is written with a crispness and a briskness which at once evokes a certain atmosphere: a highly intelligent unresponsiveness to theory, a fear of subjectivity (she even recalls, with obvious relish, her Oxford tutor’s phrase for mere criticism, ‘personal effusions ...”

“... form of various massages are available on the NHS. Lady Margaret Hall is the massage centre for Oxford, and in Oxford lives the diarist-narrator Theo Faron, cousin and boyhood friend of the Warden and teacher of history (‘the least rewarding discipline for a dying species’) to the last generation born, the ...”

“... On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police. There are ...”

“... found that he had a talent for verbal cut and thrust, and honed it still further when he went to Oxford. He didn’t have the privilege or sense of entitlement of many of his contemporaries – Old Etonians such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson – and he had chosen to read English rather than politics, philosophy and economics, the degree of choice for ...”

“... English, that flat in London, that post on Time and Tide, those interesting wellcut clothes, that Oxford degree.’ And, she might have added, those six vivid, heartfelt novels, the last, South Riding (1936), achieving the status of a minor classic of the critical portrait-of-England genre. And that flatmate, pretty, political Vera Brittain. And that ...”

“... father remarried, Louis was sent off to Sherborne Prep in Dorset; Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford followed. He married twice, having a child in each marriage, and after years of teaching and freelancing, signed a permanent contract with the BBC in 1941. He worked there – with a couple of hiatuses – until his death, writing and producing radio plays ...”

“... of Winchester and chancellor of England, and so endowed the college as to make it the richest in Oxford or Cambridge until the foundation of Cardinal College (renamed Christ Church after Wolsey’s fall). It did no harm to Magdalen that Wolsey, who was one of its fellows, himself became Henry VIII’s chancellor. When I was senior bursar of the college in ...”

“... questions of definition and evaluation; and each contains much to applaud. Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant past, while the Faber book takes as its starting-point (as ...”

“... rules of transformational grammar. If Prausnitz’s book is one sign of the times, then The New Oxford Companion to Music is another. It is the work of some ninety contributors and is twice as long as the old one, which was written by Percy Scholes with the help of, among others (we are told in the tenth edition), his mother-in-law, and was published in ...”

“... In 1989, I was invited to a party in London. I was a graduate student at Oxford, supposedly writing a dissertation on D.H. Lawrence but actually doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d completed a short novel; an extract from it had appeared in this paper, as had a poem and a review. It was on the basis of these that I must have been invited that night to the party, which was a celebration of the London Review of Books’s tenth anniversary ...”

“... same time as this scam was unfolding, we spot Drury in the unpredictable company of the Earl of Oxford. Among various accusations laid against Oxford by his former friend Henry Howard was this: ‘thus did he proffer all his cutters to Thom Drury to hew my lord Howard in pieces.’ ...”

“... was only in retrospect that her school years seemed dull. Murdoch went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1938. As at Badminton, she wanted to try everything. Now there was far more to try and more at stake in doing so. She knew already that she wanted to be a writer and had thought she wanted to study English. From English she turned to classics. Her ...”

“... When I was a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B ...”

“... mid-20th-century Britain, a culture which embraced ‘the unemployed labourer in Huddersfield, the Oxford don, the shopkeeper in Leeds, and the typist in Grimsby’. The book pursues cultural history by the accumulative method, piling up instance on instance and secondary source on secondary source; those in need of the information it contains will find that ...”

“... book. Yet the novel that burst on the world in 1740 is almost entirely unknown. This new Oxford edition of Pamela is the first British one ever to return to Richardson’s original. In America, Richardson’s biographers Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel produced for Riverside a version of the 1740 Pamela, but it was rarely used in the US, and usually ...”