“... Another of his enduring and famous aversions was to dons, and particularly to the dons of Oxford. He himself, arriving at Balliol a little late and with a useful edge on his contemporaries there in point of maturity and experience of the world, had a brilliant undergraduate career, becoming President of the Union after establishing himself as its best ...”

“... arose from penury in boyhood and from the crushing disappointment of the cancellation of his Oxford entrance due to a sudden crisis in the family funds. These were all vested in India. ‘What made the blow even worse was being withdrawn from the scholarship exam at the last moment. In the face he showed the world young Wodehouse accepted the decision ...”

“... the seamless web Lord Acton dreamed about for the Cambridge Modern History. So, do we need a New Oxford History of England? The old one, got off the ground with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume on 1914-45, does not much ring in the mind, except for its first two volumes ...”

“... The last few years​  have been rich in Oxford Books, and I have read three of them: 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and erudition by Roger Lonsdale, and Travel Verse, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. When I say ‘read them’ I mean I have dipped copiously, as one usually does with anthologies, sometimes taking years to digest the whole ...”

“... great thoughts’); the last ends with his death in 1991. In between, the journals cover Paris and Oxford in the 1920s, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the postwar New York art scene, the Biafran War, and even an unlikely association with a British affiliate of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Mountstuart publishes a number of books, contracts a number of ...”

“... and gated, curiously Orientalised citadel that floats illuminated in the sky. The man represents Oxford University: ‘Come and dwell with me, my boy,’ he says to the young Ruskin College, ‘and forget all about nasty things like wages and class struggles. They are so sordid!’The cartoon, reproduced in Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s People’s History ...”

“... injured air. Now London’s notion of a petty crime Is simple murder or straightforward rape And Oxford Street’s a bombing range, to go Back to the opal sunset while there’s time Seems only common sense. Make your escape To where the prawns assume a size and shape Less like a new-born baby’s little toe. Your tender nose anointed with zinc cream, A ...”

“... as that he began to believe his own bunkum. He took me vaguely under his wing: wrapping me in his Oxford gown he said, ‘Now I’m going to tell them a lot of nonsense.’ It was no-nonsense nonsense. When mid-lecture he tripped into his poems you didn’t notice: the art of irreverence, anti-rhetoric, Yeats had nothing on it – the cool web ... For the ...”

“... a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set themselves the task of figuring out how to make ...”

“... football.’ Liberation came in 1908 when he gained a Classical scholarship to University College, Oxford. Four years later he was elected to a philosophy fellowship at Pembroke College. He spent the rest of his professional life in Oxford, ascending to the Waynflete Chair in 1935, which lifted the teaching burden of thirty ...”

“... In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary ...”

“... sleeping with each other, or at any rate with Bernal.) She was soon headhunted back to Oxford by her old college, Somerville, which proved an extraordinarily supportive employer; so much so, that when she married and very soon became pregnant, they went to the lengths of offering her paid maternity leave, so that she could continue her work. (It ...”

“... not spell. It is all too easy to present him as Squire Booby of Booby Hall. Before going up to Oxford he had to be coached by a Mr Smith (later the Master of Balliol), while Mrs Smith endeavoured to enliven him by singing a comic song: ‘My jolly red nose, caused by gin, I suppose.’ Despite intensive coaching, he nearly failed the ...”

“... revolution occurred in the theory and practice of editing Shakespeare with the publication of the Oxford Shakespeare. This collected edition was founded on two major beliefs which have shaped, and sometimes deformed, thinking about Shakespeare for the past two decades. The first was that Shakespeare was a man of the theatre who collaborated with ...”

“... and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War. Macmillan broke down as soon as he got to Eton and had to be withdrawn by his mother – J.B.S. Haldane later spread a rumour ...”