“... A tremendous amount of work is still to be done: in the introduction to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this ...”

“... to live in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, in 1972 I had long since left Oxford and in any case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined ...”

“... we sent them our bona fide young historians and literary scholars to research their Harvard and Oxford PhDs, while they sent us spies in the guise of scientists. From the Soviet standpoint, both sides sent their spies, since those Western PhD students, however academically legitimate, were bound to be trying to ferret out Soviet secrets. This assumption on ...”

“... Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire ...”

“... English contemporaries, whom he first encountered in his teens at Shrewsbury School and then at Oxford, did not have the benefit of these instructive experiences in all-pervasive religion. In comparison to Ireland, religion has played a secondary role in the teaching and writing of history in the UK. All of Brown’s work displays a grasp of religious ...”

“... was not the kind of person who gets the blame. What he did get was a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford (the Warden kindly advised him to do some reading over the summer in preparation for his teaching), and another lady, Sylva Norman, whose literary ambitions he assisted. Teaching was as much a success in Oxford as it had ...”

“... also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford Book of War Poetry is a discussion of the chivalric ideal in the British public school classes of the 19th century. ‘Honour the charge’ makes the cavalrymen of the Light Brigade into Arthurian heroes; ‘Noble Six Hundred’ places them in the ...”

“... take his place.’ The newcomer was A.J. Ayer, known as ‘Freddie’, whom Dee took up with at an Oxford dance in 1956: ‘So far as I can gather from his books etc he’s the big deal in logical positivism etc,’ she wrote to a friend. Freddie’s womanising – then and later – only made him more lovable. ‘Since I adored him,’ Gully says, ‘it made ...”

“... new gods from elsewhere – a phenomenon discussed by Ralph Anderson in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion. Athens imported the Thracian Sabazios and Bendis; the Hellenistic world the Egyptian Isis, the Phrygian Cybele and the Syrian Atargatis, as well as inventing the hybrid god Sarapis, whose name derives from the Egyptian ...”

“... Soon after Vera Brittain returned to continue her interrupted studies at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919, she began to avoid mirrors, believing that there was a dark shadow, like the beginnings of a beard, on her chin. A strikingly pretty woman with a concomitant interest in clothes she was thoughtfully given a college room containing five large mirrors: ‘I avoided it from breakfast till bedtime and if ever I had to go in to change my clothes or fetch a book, I pressed my hands desperately against my eyes lest five identical witches’ faces should suddenly stare at me from the cold remorseless mirrors ...”

“... between the Streams (1984); Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986); The Stolen Light (1989); Up at Oxford (1993); Remembering Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ (1998); All for Love (2001); Dark Harbour (2003); The Red Letters (2004). Many long-term writing projects are unfinished, of course. The author gives up or steps away into death. Other long projects, like ...”

“... prospects for his former homeland were not good, and returned to England, resuming his studies in Oxford in January 1946. He graduated with a First in 1947 (allowed to take a shorter course because of his war service), and then, through the patronage of Balliol’s Scottish master, A.D. Lindsay, was immediately appointed as an assistant lecturer in moral ...”

“... the pulse of the age. The 1930s, as Chris Baldick observed in his excellent recent volume in the Oxford English Literary History, 1910-40: The Modern Movement, were ‘the last years in which that assumption was widely shared’. Quite how widely is hard to say, of course, just as it would be rash to assume that it has altogether died out even now. But ...”

“... are reminded of the laird’s pedigree (chief of the Macpherson clan), schooling (Wellington and Oxford), Army career (commander in the SAS) and record as a High Court judge (‘cheerfully bunging illegal immigrants back on the plane’). Johnson quotes Macpherson as telling him: ‘Asylum-seekers are one thing, but there are a tremendous number of people ...”

“... the automobiles, the black Grandiose, or red, gold-lined Elegances: flashing along through London, Oxford, the blossoms and lanes. They stop at the wayside pubs and enthusiasts Boast, munch, wipe, compare. This is the lunchtime that takes forever, Our dads somewhere there. Then oils and alloys come, so do Enforced windows and speeds, old names Now for the ...”