“... the paper feels some obligation towards a man whose twenty-year teaching career at Ruskin College, Oxford, was cut short because he went on writing for it during the Wapping lockout, there must be more to it than that. The Principle of Duty was enthusiastically reviewed in the Financial Times, the Mail on Sunday hailed it as a blast of the trumpet against the ...”

“... them to his son George. George, a solid Restoration Tory, was also a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He quarrelled with the college authorities, and sulked off to Worcester College, to which he bequeathed his huge library. His father’s record of the Putney Debates lay buried, unseen and apparently unnoticed, in the bowels of the college library for the ...”

“... The first meaning of ‘band’ given in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘That with or by which a person or thing is bound’. This seems appropriate for the word’s musical connotations as well as its more literal sense. Anyone with practical experience in the jazz, rock or folk music worlds will know that bands are, first and foremost, bindings together of personalities, undertaken in the hope of producing something greater than the mere sum of the individuals ...”

“... just what I wanted to know about the ‘coroplasts of Boeotia’. (The nearest my Shorter Oxford Dictionary comes to ‘coroplast’ is ‘coroplasty’, a word used in eye surgery, ‘an operation for forming an artificial pupil’. Professor Bell’s word must come via the ancient Greek for ‘a modeller of small figures’, which I found in my ...”

“... the fact that Dr Leavis is such a clumsy and graceless writer.’ (This used to be very familiar Oxford doctrine. ‘Would you take riding lessons,’ I recall an Oxford examination candidate who had put in a good word for the Cambridge sage being asked, ‘from a man who can’t sit a horse?’) But Mr Symons has an ...”

“... recorded, ‘understandingly’ consented to his being nominated for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford; it was on his election that he relinquished his full-time employment and became a member of the board. Other marks of favour followed: a CBE and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1970; in 1972 he became a Governor of the BBC, and in 1976 a Member of ...”

“... of no practical interest. How otherwise to explain the fact that there was no outcry when the Oxford University Press recently published a book by one Michael Tooley whose theme was a defence of infanticide? How else to explain the lack of public reaction to an article published some time ago in which it was suggested that a handicapped child could be ...”

“... artist John Piper’s wife (and emphatically ‘My Myfanwy’ in Betjeman’s poem ‘Myfanwy at Oxford’), is quoted by Hillier as saying: ‘the game had to be played.’ Maybe that’s just poets for you: a poem, after all, is a game. More than anything perhaps, Betjeman liked collecting people; that was the great game. His high regard for anyone with a ...”

“... has, since the 1960s, maintained an alternative aesthetic to the poets and poetry associated with Oxford in the same period. Unsympathetically put (or from the Oxford point of view), the aesthetic is obscurity: dislocation of syntax, metaphor, subject, the lyric ‘I’. You signify it, it’s dislocated. Prynne is the ...”

“... disapproval of anything that is offered to them under the heading of Pop Art, so the folly of Oxford philosophers sixty or more years ago in rejecting relativity theory and quantum theory, on the mere basis of their a priori intuitions, has made their successors wary of encroaching on the territory of physics in any way at all. Cambridge ...”

“... irony does not seem to have deserted him: there may perhaps be a use for it at All Souls College, Oxford, where this poet is now a fellow. He acknowledges that, while privileged young Westerners like himself are embracing Eastern values, there is a corresponding shift in the other direction, as young Easterners aspire to the fruits of Western materialism, and ...”

“... competition to give her an ancestry has been raging for generations. Now the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – the new, gorgeously refashioned Ashmolean, which reopened last November with 39 new galleries – has joined in.* The Lost World of Old Europe reveals a brilliant, imaginative, precocious culture that arose in south-eastern Europe in the late Neolithic ...”

“... a pioneer graduate, student thesp and suffragist at Somerville College, Oxford – it was the father’s family that ‘set a tone and a standard’ (including the habit of overlooking the female members: Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers omitted the two sisters from its title, dismissing ‘poor Ethel’, the eldest sibling, as ...”

“... i. Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983 Walking to Woodstock Road from Wytham where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood’s wands, we talked salmon, midges, flood meadows, the energy system cindering softly under us, slow-cooking the marshlands. ‘The gate ought to be here. The map said so. That map back at my flat . .  ...”

“... peculiar slant on the world as his mature writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First (the circumstances undescribed in the diary) I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach – and teach badly. It was the fairly spurious ...”