“... and with what definition, the word Blairism should appear in new dictionaries. The Compact Oxford found no room for it, saying that the word must pass the test of time. The compilers of the New Penguin were braver, but, it seems, had a devil of a time choosing an appropriate definition. One happy draft referred to ‘the absence of a fundamental ...”

“... social implications of what he was suggesting: ‘The whole communication from Charing-Cross to Oxford Street will be a boundary, and complete separation between the Streets and the Squares occupied by the Nobility and Gentry, and the narrower streets and meaner houses occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community.’ The plan ...”

“... was, in fact, a wildly emotional Russian Jew behaving with the eccentric composure of an imaginary Oxford don. As the letters make clear, he was troubled by the forms of ease his unease took. His detachment always puzzled him. He felt it to be at once a necessity and a self-estranging technique. Being able to be more English than the English while being ...”

“... Brooke, like his novel-writing clerical forbear, Peter Priggins, was up at Worcester College, Oxford, where he often felt lonely, but seems to have lived the fairly typical life of a Proust-Joyce-Firbank-reading undergraduate. Oxford memories soon became blurred for him, but he remembered sending an article on the ...”

“... of Theologasters shall we throw out from God’s temple like pollutants and dust-heaps?’ The Oxford edition presents Milton’s Latin text facing a new English translation. This is on the whole less snappy than the version in the Yale edition of the prose by John Carey (which often adds grunt to Milton’s already pugnacious arguments), but provides an ...”

“... and the mask of reserve – assumed directly after he inexplicably failed his finals in Greats at Oxford – became a perfected gesture, a way of being in the world structured as a renunciation. Most versions of the story prefer a Housman who was ‘suicided’ by society – as Artaud said of Van Gogh – or, worse, a Housman who was his own natural ...”

“... and academic freedom. Suppose that a climate change denier wants to speak at, or be employed by, Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. It is presumably within the rights of Oxford’s geography dons – world experts in ecological change and crisis – to deny him a platform or a job. Indeed, that is the ...”

“... house, holding our noses. Not the stuff of poetry, rotting rats. Yeats turned father down for the Oxford Modern Verse with ‘Too reasonable, too truthful. We poets should be good liars ... gay warty lads’ – perverse: at about that time he was busy climbing down to set up in rag and bone. Father harboured that. His poems continued to ripple in subsong ...”

“... is also the ultimate destination of Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, although the route she takes to get there is quite different from Sinfield’s, encompassing ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, denunciations of effeminacy in Blackwood’s Magazine and Jowett’s reforms of the ...”

“... new biography of Alexander Fleming. Macfarlane, an emeritus professor of clinical pathology at Oxford, brings exact professional knowledge and an easy writing style to his task. He starts with the popular account of the discovery of penicillin: that a strange mould colonised a plate of bacteria Fleming was culturing, and that, noticing the bacteria around ...”

“... that they were interested in everything.’ Aubrey, born in Wiltshire, attended Trinity College, Oxford in the 1640s, but his studies were interrupted by the rumble of civil war. He watched squadrons of soldiers train in New College gardens. He noted that John Denham’s topographical poem Cooper’s Hill (1642) was printed on ‘a sort of browne ...”

“... bitterly, who had presumably played a part in getting them the scholarships most of them had at Oxford and Cambridge. For them the scholarship examination, from which I’d just managed to scrape a place, had almost been a formality. They had been schooled for it and groomed for the interviews that followed, with the scholarships and exhibitions that ensued ...”

“... the traditional dish of Saturday, mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage.’ In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... is set in the summer of 1983. It is a time of innocence. Nick Guest has just graduated from Oxford, and is living in Notting Hill with the Feddens: Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly ...”