“... to the Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy which Mr Jonathan Cohen is editing for the Oxford University Press. Its aim, as expressed in the blurb, is ‘to develop an empiricist alternative to both logical positivism and scientific realism’. In fact, Van Fraassen has very little to say about logical positivism, which he regards as ...”

“... speak not of this college or that, but of the University as a whole: and, gentleman, what a whole Oxford is!’ Congratulations to the Press of the said University. Their first printing of this book is 160,000, and that doesn’t include the needs of the ...”

“... of condescension that had nothing to do with policy. Mary Warnock objected to her clothes, her Oxford tutor Dorothy Hodgkin famously brushed her off as ‘a perfectly good second-class chemist’, while on the social front Tatler captioned pictures of the prime minister ‘Mrs Denis Thatcher’. Accused of snobbery the magazine explained that this was the ...”

“... Congress in Berlin. It finds Taylor jetting to major centres of Bardbiz in London, Chicago, Oxford, Stratford, Washington, Paris and elsewhere, offering en route a tough-guy run-down on the scholars and critics operating in each place. Who would have thought the Bard had undone so many? Pale groaning shades slink ...”

“... its readers, one of them so incensed that he suggests that had I been older and at Cambridge not Oxford I might have been a spy myself. Not so, though it wasn’t age or university or sexual inclination that would have ruled me out. It was class.5/6 July, Yorkshire. Watch various stages of the Tour de France on TV more out of an interest in the topography ...”

“... towards a career as a philosopher when he came from Harvard to spend the academic year 1914-15 at Oxford, but, having burned those bridges by not returning to defend his dissertation, he embarked on an institutionally unanchored life. Yet in less than a decade, he was being thought of for academic posts in English literature, despite having no formal ...”

“... it’s a 21st-century story. The process takes a decade and a bit. A philosophical idea starts in Oxford, spreads rapidly, finds a believer who becomes famous and grows in fame with him, thrives despite loud criticism, and then undergoes a huge scandal as the famous person does something which confirms the charges the movement’s detractors have been making ...”

“... the Nehrus, became acquainted with the lives and writings of Tagore and Gandhi, and won a place at Oxford in 1964. Suu Kyi’s student years are among the best documented and the most entertaining to read about. She represented a type which is forgotten in conventional reminiscence of the 1960s: passionate, idealistic, but determinedly and almost aggressively ...”

“... almost a hundred boys who got into Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography; and if Oxford seemed a bit disappointing after that, Harrison could still claim that he read enough there to ensure his conversion from orthodoxy and Toryism to republicanism and free-thinking. Oxford and Cambridge, virtually the sole ...”

“... a schoolmaster. Another, it was alleged, had been snapped up half-price on being sent down from Oxford after a distinguished foreign guest at his college, who had the night before stumbled into the unfortunate man’s bedroom mistaking it for his own, announced to the High Table that, as far as he could make out, the most significant difference between his ...”

“... On 4 July 1934 Harold Wilson, an 18-year-old schoolboy waiting to go up to Oxford, proposed to Gladys Baldwin, the pretty young typist he’d first seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime minister ...”

“... magazine started by Cyril Connolly in 1940, and that I eventually did get a scholarship to Oxford I put down to the smattering of culture I gleaned from its pages. In my day, it was a predominantly male institution with the main tables dividing themselves almost on religious or ethnic lines. There was a Catholic table, patronised by boys from St ...”

“... academics have a general policy against signing them. I discovered that was true of some of my Oxford colleagues last year, when I drafted and circulated an open letter condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Some, like those who are in precarious employment or whose immigration status isn’t settled, have good reasons for ...”

“... events sink inextricably into the comfortable (or dreary) domesticity of the married state. The Oxford Book of Marriage closely reflects the dominant literary tradition. Rubinstein groups most of her extracts in chapters that focus on the classic ‘turning points’ within married life. The overall effect is disconcerting and strangely alien. It is rather ...”

“... fairy tales from all over is lively enough in its way, though lacking the real distinction of the Oxford Book. Most have a very positive moral indeed; it is surprising that so many traditional stories, from Lithuania to Malawi, should share so much political correctness. But many have a residue of cruder good sense, like the Norwegian tale of the lassie who ...”