“... is not wrong, but there is a bit more to it than that. Thirty years earlier, the frightful Earl of Oxford, during the mercifully short period when he claimed to be one of them, had complained that the Catholics ‘like good Ave Mary coxcombs were content to lay down their heads until they were taken off, and therefore ... wished that for every one they lost ...”

“... a completely different sort of virus to express Spike. The vaccine developed by scientists at Oxford in partnership with AstraZeneca is the most advanced candidate of this kind. Sars-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, making protein directly from the viral genome; the vaccine is an adapted DNA virus, instructing the production of RNA and then protein in the ...”

“... sacrificed brilliance. He was 38 when he was killed, no mere promising BA sent straight from Oxford to the trenches: the achievement of a fuller lifetime was beginning to form by the time of his death. Recollection of promise has until now been all that remained, along with fragrant but sincere declarations from adoring disciples such as Lady Diana ...”

“... and in so doing he had assigned himself his own bullet. In 1948, Pasternak warned his sisters in Oxford against printing some early chapters of Dr Zhivago, which he had sent them via an (unidentified) intermediary. ‘Publication abroad would expose me to the most catastrophic, not to mention fatal, dangers,’ he wrote. Since then, the Thaw (taken from the ...”

“... of the Welsh border, became a political activist at 14, in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for Pandy village hall. In 1939 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, an informal precursor of the post-war ...”

“... he pays to it. The world of The Book and the Brotherhood turns between the twin poles of the Oxford college and Kensington. Hounslow is nowhere on its map. Murdoch’s world does not contain lozenges of dog turd. Dog turd, any turd by any name falls outside its vocabulary. By the same law, so do the processes of contemporary politics. Mrs Thatcher could ...”

“... degree in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegelian he may have been by choice, but he was at Oxford during the postwar glory days of ordinary language philosophy. That shows wonderfully in the correspondence. Life was not easy on him. He was for many years a Communist, not so terrible a thing in those days for an intellectual, but in addition he was not ...”

“... doctors – had adopted a girl from South Korea. Sheena had learned Korean for her. After Oxford, Sheena got a PhD in political science at Harvard, with a focus on the ‘politics of democracy and dictatorship’. She met Eric Greitens when he spoke on a panel about political leadership, and it seemed that no sooner had they started dating than they ...”

“... and I’ve never lived in London. I’m a provincial … Which is everywhere but London, Oxford and Cambridge, and one or two rather well-to-do spots around that way. It doesn’t mean much, but it affects the way you behave, and what you root for and what you snarl at.’ A lifelong, rather cheerful agoraphobe and hermit, neglect suits ...”

“... to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. Randall Stevenson’s volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an account of 1960 to 2000, prompts these thoughts, because his book has no interest in aesthetic intention and no interest in aesthetic success. It is a purely academic account of hundreds of literary forms created ...”

“... War is an antidote to assumptions of ‘inevitability’. A collection of excellent essays by Oxford historians, incorporating the conclusions of the latest scholarship, it examines government and military thinking and the popular mood throughout Europe during the July-August 1914 crisis, and then the position in each of the major capitals in the order in ...”

“... mutual esteem between the elder statesman and ‘the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford’. Yes, yes, there are differences. The SDP turned out to be a puny successor to the Gladstonian Liberal Party. Conversely, Gladstone’s eight-day sojourn at All Souls in 1890 and his inauguration of the Romanes Lectures in 1892 pales by comparison with ...”

“... John Jones, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has written a number of good, idiosyncratic books on topics as diverse as Greek tragedy and Wordsworth, together with an excellent novel, The Same God, published in 1972 and apparently without a successor. He has now produced a good, idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare ...”

“... Then, for many university-educated young men (in fact for roughly half of the students enrolled at Oxford and Cambridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries), there was the church, which was for most a pragmatic choice rather than a spiritual vocation.One of the few things the gentlemanly professions had in common was a structural reliance on money and ...”