“... another. The books have changed their format over the years but continue not to resemble the old Oxford English Texts, which appeared in handsome editions, suitable for the libraries of scholars and gentlemen, and, later, in cheaper formats for the underprivileged. In the old days there were few if any notes in the ...”

“... thrives on tricks of this kind – witness the Shelley memorial at University College, Oxford. The first time I saw If ..., Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 fable of public school rebellion, was at a screening organised by Winchester College’s film society. One of the documentaries Anderson made in the early 1950s was called Wakefield Express, about the ...”

“... vice versa. Henry Sweet is said to have expressed the fear that ‘Murray would be fired and some Oxford swell, who would draw a good salary for doing nothing, put in his place’; this use of ‘fire’, from 1878 or 1879 and uttered by an Englishman, antedates the first instance in the OED, where it is described as the ‘US slang’ it was still considered ...”

“... When Oxford University Press commissioned Ross McKibbin to write the volume in the New Oxford History of England covering the years 1918 to 1951, they got more than they bargained for. McKibbin couldn’t contain what he wanted to say within the covers of a single volume, and Oxford wouldn’t agree to the inclusion of a two-volume work in their series ...”

“... One of the first extended reviews of The Origin of Species was by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who commended Darwin’s ‘really charming writing’, his powerful demonstration of ‘the law of natural selection’, and his ‘excellent’ insight into ‘the wonderful interdependence of nature’. Wilberforce admitted to feeling uneasy with the ...”

“... the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. But it lasted four years. And even after Charles I’s capture and execution the conflict ...”

“... of everyday scholarly demands must be the chief test of its worth. But a work on the scale of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is bound also to be seen as much more than a reference tool: as, by turns, a statement of national identity, an occasion for communal pride, a showcase for contemporary historical scholarship, a piece of swagger ...”

“... Master Mercer moved on to a drab and parsimonious sodality, known as University College, at Oxford, where he ground at the Law, played minor parts in unremarked productions of the OUDS, and with difficulty achieved a Third. He then disappeared into the City as a modest clerk, reappeared after a while as a moderate barrister, and started writing for ...”

“... winning about learn-as-you-go spy-writing, and by the end of Secret Asset, we’re haring around Oxford with Rimington’s characters – quite a few of them muttering ‘May Allah be with you’ – and feeling she’s got the hang of it. Oxford works well as the setting for her dénouement and allows her to make the ...”

“... what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such callow and eagerly attentive 18-year-olds as I was fifty years ago? Of course I find this heartening as well as surprising. If the book sells, I shall he ...”

“... and tortuously rambling. They boast a certain charm in the early sections, when the diarist is an Oxford Gladstonian, but grow increasingly tedious towards the end, when editorial control should have been applied more stringently. Of Crawford’s sensitivity there can be no doubt, but he expressed himself awkwardly and often with an arrogant credulity. ‘I ...”

“... commentary. Eliot himself provided, if not a commentary, useful notes upon The Waste Land, and an Oxford don, John Fuller, has written an excellent commentary on Auden’s poems. In the case of a text written in an ancient language, a commentary is particularly useful. The Greeks themselves had started to write commentaries on Greek poems as early as the ...”

“... have been well served, for the familiar thick tomes of Hoyt, Benham, Bartlett, Stevenson, the Oxford (recently revised) and the Penguin have been joined by works like the Wintle/Kenin Dictionary of Biographical Quotations and numerous slimmer, more specialised, often racy volumes; and now, in paperback, comes a curiously titled blockbuster from ...”

“... across Europe, as well as back in time to the Cambridge of Philby – actually, to a stop on the Oxford to Cambridge line, on the assumption that Oxford, too, had its interest for the NKVD. This novel has an epigraph from an early John Buchan tale, and it provokes comparisons. There’s less of the disengaged amateur about ...”

“... Heights in the north. The heartland conveniently excludes London and Birmingham, while Oxford is somewhere near the centre of it. The Beckinsales aim to describe and explain the imprint made by successive generations upon this eminently habitable and amiable piece of country. Prehistoric settler, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane and Norman all found ...”