“... with an Oxbridge background the Labour Party could do worse than turn to Bryan Gould (the last Oxford don on the Labour Front Bench – and this essay was, as I remember, cheekily entitled ‘Going for Gould’ by the editors of the LRB). In his preamble to this piece, Johnson says that after he wrote it there was ‘an avalanche of similar criticism about ...”

“... Plato in translation; then, it seems, life began to make some kind of sense. When she went up to Oxford to read English, Auden was at Christ Church, and Waugh had just left Hertford. Renault’s Oxford might have been on another planet. Five years before her arrival, women had been granted full membership of the ...”

“... and see whether the unexpected renascence of the condom has restored the Putney decorations. The Oxford English Faculty supplies the papers with two very different sorts of reviewer – the ubiquitous John Bayley and John Carey, more stably attached to the Sunday Times. They could hardly be more different – Bayley a kind of long-legged fly, his bright ...”

“... inconsistent or absurd medley’ – which seems harsh, but it is Taylor’s word, not mine. The Oxford Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Simon Gatrell and the late Juliet Grindle, is in any case, we must suppose, one of those critical editions that Taylor declares to be ‘long-needed’. I will take his word for that: though, weighing its 600-plus ...”

“... this typifies the sort of interchange of influences we are studying – one in which Kipling and Oxford also play a part. From the inheritance we can disentangle, first, the Oxfordian ‘most-brilliant-young-man-of his generation’ concept. Buchan’s advice to himself on his 21st birthday was: ‘Get the Newdigate, Get the Stanhope... Take strong interest ...”

“... to all who knew him but not in this book), Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946-1970, gain the crown? But if E-P be held to deserve apotheosis then Mary Douglas seems, on the face of it, a very appropriate hagiographer, for she is a noted anthropologist in her own right, was once a pupil of E-P, and, like E-P himself in his ...”

“... book about Spooner, published by W.H. Allen in 1977, by Sir William Hayter, Warden of New College, Oxford 1958-1976. Throughout the book he describes the spoonerism as ‘metaphasis’, a word which is not in the OED. The correct word is ‘metathesis’. He must have misheard it at High Table. This error is repeated in The ...”

“... Between 1896 and 1907, the Oxford Egyptologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spent six seasons digging the low, sandy mounds surrounding the village of el-Behnesa, a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile. In concentrating on the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos (literally, ‘city of the sharp-nosed fish’), they were not aiming to uncover another set of impressive ruins that could rival those of Leptis Magna, Ephesus or Pompeii ...”

“... good translations is more pressing than ever. Publishers seem to understand this, as witness a new Oxford edition of Horace’s Odes (1997) by David West, and a Penguin Aeneid from the same hand (1990), while A.J. Woodman’s edition of Tacitus’ Annals is eagerly awaited. But a Loeb edition is rather more: some volumes have full introductions and ample ...”

“... Griselda Pollock, Briony Fer, Mignon Nixon, Anne Wagner and Alex Potts in a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal (22 February 1999) devoted to the artist. At the same time, Bourgeois has provided herself with a textual persona as tantalising and contradictory as her sculptural work: indeed, the artist’s writing constitutes an important part of her ...”

“... campaign to remove statues of him from the University of Cape Town and the front of Oriel College, Oxford. Schreiner’s accusations led Rhodes’s supporters to dismiss her as a vamp who had turned sour after Rhodes refused to marry her. They said he got on famously with ‘natives’ in his mines and with the Ndebele chiefs he had eventually talked into ...”

“... left écossaises for piano, and there is nothing Scottish about any of them. Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music Like Robert Louis Stevenson living in Samoa, like George MacBeth living in Sheffield, like Ian Brady living in Greater Manchester, I am a Scotsman living in exile; my father was the first of the family to fly South – my grandfather ...”

“... Gritstone, Bluefaced Leicester, Herdwick, Hill Radnor, Devon Longwool, Beulah Speckled-Face, Oxford Down, Welsh Mountain, North Country Cheviot, do not exhaust the names of our sheep. There is so much to celebrate: the fine rain making midges on a pool, the appalled moon, and the crescent moon at morning which fades like fat in a frying-pan, the frail ...”

“... he seems to have been sitting for the last thirty years. Inglis seems almost equally besotted with Oxford, and a WEA summer school at Balliol, where Raymond lectured in the Fifties, becomes the occasion for an inspirational (if inaccurate) Baedeker of the Broad. Likewise, Inglis seems to be on familiar terms with all his chosen players, seldom allowing a name ...”

“... Arithmetic twice in the examination for the Diplomatic Service, took rooms in King Edward Street, Oxford to cram for a third attempt. Here, at riotous dinner parties, much wine was drunk and more was thrown, a special kind of port, called ‘throwing port’, being reserved for the latter function, while the sound of broken glass usually concluded the ...”