“... and Burma. Worldwide, the annual number of human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of Medicine says: ‘The major animal reservoirs are urban rats as well as rural rodents including ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The Oriental rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis is the most efficient vector. When bitten by a rodent flea humans become ...”

“... education came in fits and starts, at Lemberg, Lausanne, the LSE, and eventually Balliol College, Oxford. At Lausanne, one of his lecturers was Vilfredo Pareto, whose work focused on the sociology of elites, but Hayton cautions against reading too much into this. More immediately influential were the geographical interpretation of politics pioneered by ...”

“... Many years ago it was the habit of the PPE tutors in Magdalen College, Oxford to hold a discussion group for their undergraduates. At one such meeting we were somewhat disconcerted to find we had been gatecrashed by an extremely loud and talkative outsider of Marxist bent who laid down the law about everything, referred to the dons as ‘comrade’ – he did not know my name, so I was ‘the red-headed comrade’ – and rather capsized the whole evening ...”

“... data held for Labour. Take, for example, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins (both grammar school and Oxford, Jenkins the son of a miner MP) not to mention Shirley Williams (professional parents, St Paul’s and Oxford): social mobility had already carried them to Labour’s outer limits. At the least, it had to be expected ...”

“... favourite novelist, George Eliot: first the escape from a stifling provincialism, then a place at Oxford, followed by a vocation among ‘the poor and striving and thoughtful’. Her feminism was both instinctive and brave; unwilling to be traded on the Buxton marriage market, she swore never to marry except on terms of companionship and equal ...”

“... Unitarian. His daughter quotes from their courtship letters, as she later quotes from her own. At Oxford, as the Zuleika Dobson of the Twenties, Elizabeth Harman entered the ‘charmed circle’ of aesthetes after passing a shibboleth test imposed by Hugh Gaitskell, who asked: ‘What do you think of Oscar Wilde and all that?’ Her reply, ‘Oh, I think ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it wonderfully evokes the euphoria of licensed idleness in beautiful surroundings (he was at Magdalen) while remaining beady-eyed about its snobbery and self-absorption. He ...”

“... figure. He comes into the history books as the victorious pro-Munich candidate at the famous Oxford by-election of 1938, is Under-Secretary for Air in Churchill’s Government by 1945, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Suez, the head of various other ministries, Tory Party Chairman and, for a record 12 years, Lord Chancellor, formally the ...”

“... his two sons to school in England, and to Wales for the holidays. Clough’s abortive career as an Oxford don and his perceived failure to make something of his gifts damaged his personal and literary reputation. Many years after he left Oxford people still knew him only as the author of half a volume of ...”

“... In any case his father put an end to thoughts of a musical career by forcing him to go to Oxford. Golding loathed Oxford with what seems an almost morbid intensity. He had a special dislike for Brasenose, described by Carey as a college to which the public schools sent their least interesting men. His sojourn there ...”

“... residence was on a war footing. First it became a garrison then a refugee camp for families from Oxford. Trenches were dug and holes for muskets chiselled through the walls. Ancient trees were felled to deny attackers cover and cottages pulled down to open up clear lines of fire. Homes were pillaged for everything from livestock and cereals to weapons and ...”

“... well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill. There’s a rare sighting of her, a diminutive figure flanked by solemn men in suits, in a photograph in the March 1933 issue of the Bystander, a gossipy society ...”

“... World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write. Austin died of cancer in 1960 at the age of 48. Though he published only a handful of ...”

“... Century: A Century of Wars and Revolutions (Rivers Oram, £14.99). Not to be outdone by Brewer, Oxford are marketing their ‘major new edition’ of the Oxford Compact English Dictionary (£11.99) on the way its new words ‘reflect Y2K Britain’. ‘In a world of spin and political correctness,’ the press release ...”