“... the Texas Observer and Harper’s Magazine by way of a place called Yazoo and a university named Oxford, is now listening. ‘Mr Bill,’ Southern whispers into Faulkner’s ear, ‘why are you and I already drinking brandy and everyone else is still drinking wine?’ ‘Terry,’ the self-described Delta dirt farmer replies, ‘there was a saying in ...”

“... to the apes, dramatically epitomised at the height of the Darwinian controversy at the notorious Oxford British Association Meeting in 1860, if not so decisively settled in Huxley’s favour as Darwinians and future generations agreed to think, was damaging and somewhat undignified. Above all, Owen had been upstaged; the subject in which his reputation was ...”

“... Life. After discharge from the Army, he visits England with friends, decides he wants to go to Oxford, hires tutors to prepare him for the entrance examinations and ends up reading English at Hertford College, ‘where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students’. ‘I seldom speak of it,’ he confesses, ‘because to say “When I was at ...”

“... Lollards ended up entrenched in places like Steeple Bumpstead, they began, Hudson argues, in Oxford. Not only did Oxford have Wycliffe. It also had the scholars and the libraries necessary to start immense projects like glossing and translating the Bible. Lollardy was in fact an academic movement, in the sense of being ...”

“... twilight of the age of Erasmus, Robert Burton, ‘that fantastic great old man’, came of age at Oxford, a representative figure of Erasmian Humanism at its apogee. Most of his library is still to be found there as he wished, divided between the Bodleian Library, and Christ Church, where Burton was himself for a time Librarian. Together, the two repositories ...”

“... bishop. Hallo ... ’ We don’t know exactly what happened at the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860. We think we know who the good guys were and who the bad hat, or mitre. We do not know exactly what the Bishop of Oxford said or what THH replied. Desmond favours a version of ‘was your grandmother a ...”

“... her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just the two of them. De Gaulle, Michael’s mother wrote, ‘talked to Michael for an hour about ...”

“... of glasnost: ‘What I want to know is when is Mr Gorbachev going to be on Blankety Blank?’ Oxford, 14 March. To Oxford to cast my vote for Roy Jenkins as Chancellor. Only 9.30, but the line of voters is already round the Sheldonian and the atmosphere that of a cocktail party. The average voter is about my age, tall ...”

“... by’ – how could this shy and awkward don capture the brilliant woman with whom everyone in Oxford (in Bayley’s eyes, and perhaps in reality too) seemed to be in love? Although he was sometimes jealous, Bayley was perfectly happy in the knowledge that Murdoch treated him as she treated no one else, even if each of her friendships was in turn different ...”

“... as he made clear in the ‘Peter Simple’ column recently, while offering assistance to an Oxford phonetician on a visit to Leeds University to record examples of ‘Modified Northern’ English. The column explained that the accent she required was strictly ‘improved South Yorkshire’, not ‘Northern’ at all but ‘North Midland’: it is ...”

“... a single-sex boarding school provide. When he finally entered the English educational system – Oxford – it was as a mature young man with several years in the diggings behind him. He had, in fact, more in common with the working-class financiers – Barnato, Joel – than with the English ‘gents’ he messed with. We are inclined to see Rhodes as ...”

“... The tyros behind the ‘Mohock Magazine’ (as it was swiftly dubbed by a London rival) were two Oxford graduates who had returned home to Scotland to practise at the bar. John Gibson Lockhart would, within a few years, return south to edit the Quarterly. But for the magazine’s first twenty-five years, its mainstay was John Wilson. As Christopher North, he ...”

“... trial in English history, the parliamentary prosecution in 1710 of Henry Sacheverell, a High Tory Oxford divine, for his sermon the previous autumn at St Paul’s before the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, on the theme ‘In peril among false brethren’. By a delicious irony, Sacheverell, the highest of High Churchmen, came from a family of Puritan ...”

“... an ancient historian, you should go through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s ...”

“... came to England when Hamburger was nine: he went to school at Westminster and Lancing, then to Oxford, yet was never fully tuned to British habits, attitudes, ways of thought. String of Beginnings, published in 1973 and now reissued with a postscript dated 1990, is the autobiography of an outsider, and perhaps all the more interesting because he seems not ...”