“... have made to conform more closely to his father’s model. When he went from St Paul’s to Oxford in 1897 – as a non-collegiate student for his first year – he already felt set in writerly ways he believed were full of integrity, but which his father considered lacking in practical usefulness. In more intimate terms, too, he had designed for ...”

“... Mahan was one. His Strategy of Sea Power, published in 1890, had earned him honorary degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy. Denis Mack Smith is another. His Cavour and Garibaldi, published in 1954, told many Italians what they did not want to hear, but told them at a special ...”

“... But it had already become a linguistically sophisticated activity. In his first year as an Oxford undergraduate he had discovered a Finnish grammar in his college library and under its influence was working on ‘Quenya’, eventually to be established as High-elven, the most developed of that ‘nexus of languages’ which he was to regard as the main ...”

“... All Must Have Prizes opens with two terrifying snapshots. The first is of students of German at Oxford University who, Phillips is informed, ‘can now only speak pidgin German’. The second snapshot is of the English department at the University of East Anglia where – Phillips has been told – incoming undergraduates are given a ‘Guide to Essay ...”

“... be better to say to his tessitura, in prose and verse. Once while living in Kennington he met two Oxford undergraduates, Jack Clark and Rodney Philips, who were interested in poetry: they ‘were in some disbelief that close to the Clark family house could actually reside a contributor to New Writing, as, in a way that now seems baffling, had been reported to ...”

“... and scope is that of Kociumbas, whose brief was to write the first post-Aboriginal volume in the Oxford History of Australia. While each of the authors in that series (myself included) worked both with and against the conventions of the general history, she was presented with the greatest challenge. All of us sought to synthesise scholarly research into a ...”

“... clatter endToo soon, turn grieved away as though  Mistaken in a friend.In 1925, Auden went to Oxford and there discovered The Waste Land. ‘I now see the way I want to write,’ he told his tutor, Nevill Coghill, a year later. He had, he said, torn up all his early poems ‘because they were no good.’ There would be no further sub-Georgian trysts with ...”

“... tubes’. It is instructive to compare his account with that in the most recent edition of The Oxford Textbook of Medicine (2004), which summarises the asthmatic as having bronchial ‘mucous gland hypertrophy and hypersecretion, smooth muscle hypertrophy and hyper-reactivity’. After stripping out the jargon there is little difference between these 19th ...”

“... historical context, analysing the late 19th-century transformation of the West End, especially Oxford Street and its environs, into a retail centre that made urban shopping a major leisure activity for women. The rise of modern shopping opened the city streets to respectable women, and played a significant role in both feminism and consumer ...”

“... in these books seem cast in a common mould. All were born in the early 1940s and did DPhils at Oxford, although McKibbin arrived there from small-town Australia and Joyce from a London Irish family. All position themselves on the left. All began their careers writing about the experience and politics of class, using social history to explain why a country ...”

“... Guy declared that the whole kerfuffle over the Tudor revolution in government was ‘old hat’. Oxford never cared very much for Elton’s version of Tudor history, and Elton had no love of Oxford. A conference devoted to ‘The Eltonian Legacy’ by the Royal Historical Society was so critical of his achievements that ...”

“... And nearly seventy years after his death, letters for him still arrive at the Press. Strangely, Oxford rejected the initial proposal, on the ground that ‘a Utopian dictionary would sell very well – in Utopia.’ But they soon cottoned on, and 60,000 copies of Fowler were sold in the first year. It has remained in print through three editions, and its ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... remained a source of exasperation into the late 1930s, by which time Attlee was Labour leader. The Oxford intellectual G.D.H. Cole irritated him as a ‘permanent undergraduate’, who had ‘a new idea every year, irrespective of whether the ordinary man was interested in it or not’. Similarly, Cole’s Oxford colleague ...”

“... they arrive at Westminster many MPs have been practising those sorts of debating skills in the Oxford, Cambridge and other student unions, while radio programmes such as Any Questions? consecrate the public place of this genre at its most excruciating. Perfect examples of what this sort of thing leads to were provided by the missions to Moscow of Michael ...”