“... dubious people who effortlessly make their mark and hold people in thrall, producing Comus at Oxford and then swiftly going up the mummers’ ladder (‘Then he got a part in a film on Channel Four. The part was small, but at one point he was required to take off his shirt’). At times I felt I was reading a cosmopolitan, if not actually louche, Barbara ...”

“... light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to Wilson’s Cabinet in the Sixties. Both served their country and ...”

“... belongs to one of the most influential generational groups in recent British history – the Oxford student cohort of the immediate post-war period who clambered aboard the great Labour surge of 1945-51. This cohort was the exact British analogue of the bright young New Dealers from the American Ivy League campuses so tellingly depicted by Mary McCarthy ...”

“... nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!’ Of course James was speaking of America in the 1830s, the world the young Hawthorne looked out on, and he was ...”

“... than the rule: early redbrick university departments striving to differentiate themselves from Oxford and Cambridge; or the English gentry, who, as Lord Stockton has reminded us, taught their genteel imitators that it was bad form to notice the manna that came to dinner. In other times and places, both hunger and plenty have proved stimulating sauces for ...”

“... however, in the end made the best of it and said that at least he should do it properly and go to Oxford. There was a Christmas party for local children at which Mother, unable to ‘trust her French to give a religious discourse’, instead ‘stood silent and still like a tableau vivant of Britannia, except that, instead of holding a trident, her arm ...”

“... the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers of those able to read Greek texts. Learned work continued for some time to be done in the 18th-century tradition: that is true of the brilliant specialised textual critics of Greek drama and of the ...”

“... was eventually banished in the 1720s for his part in a Jacobite plot. Some signs pointed to the Oxford milieu of Henry Sacheverell, a virtuoso of paranoia who a few years later was impeached by the Commons for his incendiary sermon The Perils of False Brethren, Both in Church and State (1709). As charismatic on the page as in life, Sacheverell practised a ...”

“... the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in 2004. A medievalist, his specialist subject was originally the Ormulum, a long 12th-century poem. When appointed in 1957 to edit a single-volume supplement to the OED, he was expected to bring coverage up to date, which ...”

“... 27 days away. Hodgkin, inevitably, finds that the town’s Muslim elite reminds him of ‘any Oxford (male) Senior Common Room. Highly civilised donnish characters, whose life seems to be spent almost entirely in food and prayer, and remembrance of things past.’ When he chances on a black lawyer violently opposed to Nkrumah, the man is ‘obviously a ...”

“... He is to be companion to a lady among Leavisites and read to her my book of Larkin poems; old Oxford toad is staid enough but, even he, there is a risk, if seen through high windows, might be a bit shocking to some new blue-stocking. He should be skilled, this eunuch chap, in making tea and toast, and keeping hot the water bot. He will, in ...”

“... stop there and called for a continuation, ‘all about the Woolwich, the Arts Council, the BBC and Oxford, with incidental observations on the conduct of the young, the remembered follies of youth, the tiresome defects of old age, and so forth’. Mr Fuller, apparently deaf to this plea, merely gestured finality by publishing the three books in a single ...”

“... The Oxford Companion to – or Bumper Book of – English Literature was first published in 1932 and updated in three subsequent editions and many reprints. It has now been extensively re-edited by Margaret Drabble, aided by an impressive list of experts. The original editor, Sir Paul Harvey, explained that his intention was to be useful to ordinary everyday readers ...”

“... but otherwise unharmed. I resolved on a more ambitious venture: nothing less than a journey to Oxford when I drove part of the way myself. The journey had an unexpected purpose. Some years earlier a professional portrait painter, June Mendoza, had asked me to sit for my portrait. After it was finished she offered it to Magdalen College, which, being taken ...”

“... in the consequences of the divorce reform act of 1857; in ‘monogamous countries’, the Oxford philosophy professor Henry Mansel noted in a review of 24 sensation novels in an 1863 issue of the Quarterly Review, the obsession with bigamy served as ‘a vehicle of mysterious interest or poetic justice’. Few of the novels Mansel reviewed are still ...”