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“... place under her parents’ roof, Tom (in a temporary Protestant phase) had established himself in Oxford. Mary’s starved intelligence, coupled with a vehement wish to prove herself the equal of scholarly Arnold males, made the academic charisma of Oxford seem infinitely seductive. She set about giving herself an ...”

“... of Ciceronian translation will serve both to signal the excellence of Jonathan Barnes’s Revised Oxford Translation and to highlight a feature of Aristotle’s philosophy which will have made it hard for the ancients to see his greatness. Aristotle is unique among ancient philosophers in his respect for people’s opinions: both the opinions of other ...”

“... Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At Oxford he stood on even closer terms of friendship with Clough than did his brother Matthew, despite all the effusive lamentation of the latter’s Thyrsis’. Emigrating in 1847 to New Zealand and then in 1849 to Tasmania, Tom Arnold made friends with Alfred ...”

“... his future and, in a word, ‘was the making of him’. This was getting a second-class degree at Oxford in the summer of 1903 rather than the first he and others had expected.Goldman seems to be right about this. The ‘Harry Tawney’ who arrived at Balliol from Rugby to read classics in 1899 does not seem to have been marked out for a career in socialist ...”

“... was an occasion and that I must rise to it accordingly. Ten years or so later I took my Finals at Oxford and dressed up again. This time, though, nobody laughed as we were all dressed up, in the suit, white tie, mortar-board and gown that were obligatory for the occasion. This was, I suppose, the last and most significant examination in my life and it was in ...”

“... for which the ‘fount of honour’ was the existing membership. In October 1924 he went up to Oxford, with a leaving scholarship from Eton and an open scholarship at New College. Something of the temper of his life as an undergraduate can be gathered from his comment that not all his ‘Christian colleagues in the SCM can have thought acting in [the ...”

“... offers thrilling and unexpected glimpses into the lives of others,’ claims the dustjacket of The Oxford Book of Letters. In contrast, Vincent Kaufmann cheerfully introduces his study of writers’ letters by admitting that ‘there is nothing more tedious in a writer’s work than his correspondence.’ Thrilling or tedious? Isn’t this somehow the question ...”

“... In fact, both of the reviews had the same author, Tolkien’s close friend and fellow Oxford don C.S. Lewis. Lewis was also a fellow ‘Inkling’, a member of the small club that met regularly in his Magdalen College rooms. At some of those meetings Lewis had listened to Tolkien reading aloud early drafts of parts of The Hobbit. The prevailing ...”

“... look like a trick of the moonlight and candlelight of the past: and yet most of the pieces in the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories are taken from the well-lighted last quarter of the last century and first quarter of this one. Readers of this book could be excused for thinking that ghosts have been switched on to accompany, or to compete with, the ...”

“... tabloids and in 1959 they caught a whiff of him. He was discovered to have inveigled his way into Oxford as a postgraduate in history, on the basis of a degree he didn’t have, claiming to be ten years younger than he was, and a licensed clergyman, which he wasn’t. There was also the fact of the wives: only four at that point. Preparing to leave the ...”

“... the public library as his natural habitat. That first book ended with the promise of another: an Oxford scholarship award, apparently quite unexpected, put an abrupt end to his youth in Glasgow. The war, now imminent, threatened further uncontrollable incursions into the individual life. As the new volume begins, the young man is biking south with virtually ...”

“... to leave the European Union in 2016, and was ‘the supreme authority in my family’. I went to Oxford in 1960 from Stonyhurst, the Jesuit boarding school, and in the vacation at the end of my first term met Charlotte Fawcett in the Café des Artistes, a basement club in Fulham. She had been expelled from the convent school in Sussex where her older sister ...”

“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine ...”

“... Writing in 1887 of the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance ...”

“... John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal context, for the 19th-century English Catholic church to produce a major theologian in its ...”