“... Well-meaning (but seriously pared-down) publishing conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t ...”

“... went fatally wrong. An even more striking exemplar was the remarkable career at Balliol College, Oxford of Uncle Arnold, after whom not only his nephew but Toynbee Hall in the East End of London were posthumously named. Carrying the name Arnold Toynbee was a double-edged privilege, as the behaviour of the family testifies; when the young author published his ...”

“... anthology is an important event – as significant as the appearance of Roger Lonsdale’s earlier Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse, that unmarmoreal volume. As our battle of the books is waged, and canons to the left and right volley and thunder, this dignified Fellow of Balliol has done more to change our view of the 18th century than many avowed ...”

“... 11 March. After a lie-in and lunch at Alastair Little’s fine establishment, I go by train to Oxford. The hawthorn hedges are blooming already, and I’m struck by the extraordinarily high number of fairy forts en route. A fairy fort is, as I recall from Dolan, ‘a smallish semi-circle of trees regarded as unlucky to dislodge, actually the site of an ...”

“... it not known from Scripture. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science came to Oxford in 1832 he gripped an overcrowded Holywell Music Room, almost till midnight, with the wondrous design of the giant sloth, so perfectly equipped for excavating his diet of roots that he ‘would drain all Lincolnshire in the ordinary process of digging for ...”

“... his contemporaries except perhaps for E.H. Carr. He has written two standard works of reference in Oxford series: English History 1914-1945 and The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 – now a generation old, but still the best place to go if you want to know what, say, the Schleswig-Holstein question was about. Taylor’s Bismarck, his Habsburg Monarchy ...”

“... have forgotten, as people do, how powerful are the constraints of society beyond the boundaries of Oxford and the BBC. Leaving the narrow locale of childhood we’re inclined to think we’ve landed in the big wide world, but usually, we’ve got it the wrong way round. A local man told Gilbert that ‘he must have had horrible, nasty things in his ...”

“... powerless. The book begins with Johnson’s cold reception at Pembroke College when he returned to Oxford in 1754 in order to consult some books there before completing his Dictionary. He had left the university in 1729 after just over a year’s residence because he couldn’t pay the bills and wondered, Nokes says, ‘whether, at the last moment, his own ...”

“... Kingdom’s membership of the EU throughout the 25 years since he was a student politician at Oxford. As an MEP he helped persuade David Cameron to withdraw the Tories from the conservative-liberal mainstream in the European Parliament and locate them much further to the right, in an anti-federal grouping that happened to include Nazi apologists from the ...”

“... in terms of nations or races. The arrangement was that I volunteered, and this gave me a year at Oxford. In September 1941 I went for my medical examination, half-expecting to fail, since I had been ill for much of my childhood and had always avoided exercise. The doctor asked me where I had been to school, and since, as I saw from his tie, we had this in ...”

“... and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the book he has now published. He has already given us a three-volume ...”

“... names: fellow of the Royal Society in 1972; appointed Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford in 1973; knighted in 1994; Order of Merit in 2000; the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 2008; the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. Several mathematical and physical concepts bear his name: the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems about black holes and, in ...”

“... philosopher-king. And his own trajectory, moving easily from a South Wales grammar school via Oxford to Parliament and high society, becoming chancellor by the age of 47, meant that he seemed unstoppably destined for the highest political office, and at the same time the champion of a cultivated liberal progressivism untarnished by the stale stereotypes ...”

“... OF THESE BISCUITS MADE AND SOLD EVERY WEEK. I remember a claustrophobic pub behind Christ Church, Oxford, its four sides and ceiling cased with wall-to-wall public-school ties. My aunt’s name on the gravestone surprises me. Her name was Grace Lyon. She voted for Scottish independence. As I confusedly take a cord at my uncle’s burial it is brilliantly ...”

“... years at any rate, White experienced anything but isolation. He was continually journeying up to Oxford, to meet his obligations as a non-resident fellow of his college (of which he nursed vain hopes of being elected provost). He is known to have stayed in London, too, for weeks at a time. And though certainly his friends had no luck in persuading him to ...”