“... on the edge of expanding towns and cities, and in England’s two expanding universities at Oxford and Cambridge. By the third month of 1540, this eight-centuries-old accumulation of communities under monastic and fraternal rules had ceased to exist. Protestants, anxiously scrutinising Henry VIII’s eccentric effort at Reformation to see whether it ...”

“... hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which ...”

“... nonprolific. He is surely not quite right about Trilling, who in conversation did not flatter Oxford while a visitor to it. Trilling was a committed teacher with a following among students that matched Leavis’s. But most of the observers recorded by French considered that his main importance lay in helping to form and sustain a milieu not dominated by ...”

“... mask you are wearing?’ The narrator asking himself this question is the same as in Marías’s Oxford novel, All Souls (1989), a much lighter and more charmingly sinister book; here he has acquired a name, Jacques Deza, and a wife, Luisa. (Marías himself taught at Oxford for a few years in the 1980s.) One of Deza’s ...”

“... Paradise’ – his most celebrated work. No: he was just ‘a shopkeeper, carrying on business in Oxford Street’.Admirers of Morris the revolutionary have shared his uncertainties. George Bernard Shaw thought Morris’s late-life addiction to scribbling prose romances a lowering hobby – why not take up making musical instruments instead? When Morris’s ...”

“... creation of a ‘New Left’. With Stuart Hall and other friends from his undergraduate days at Oxford, he founded Universities and Left Review (which ultimately merged with the New Reasoner to create the New Left Review), as well as the New Left Clubs and the Partisan Coffee House, an espresso bar in Soho catering to political radicals. In 1962 he joined ...”

“... a barber’s ‘soap boy’ and later as a presser in a garment factory, he won a scholarship to Oxford shortly before the war. As he left the factory, a workmate and friend warned him: ‘Ye’ll have thrown away the wurrld ye knew ... And if ye try tae find yer way back it’ll be too late, because yew’ll ’ave changed as well – an’ there’ll be ...”

“... victims of its aggression. Carpenter points out the odd kinship between Brideshead and that other Oxford fantasy Alice in Wonderland, in which all the caricatures are logically related to the authorial dream. The novel has an undoubted power and resonance about it, quite lacking in Waugh’s later trilogy of military life. It was written in a bout of ...”

“... in the present-day Labour Party. It isn’t just a matter of ambitious young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge losing interest in a party which hasn’t looked like an election winner for some years. At least as important is the attitude of the rank-and-file activists who choose the Party’s Parliamentary candidates. If the age of deference is ...”

“... Dabydeen and all other poets who sometimes use dialect might relish John Agard’s ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’ (‘mugging de Queen’s English/is the story of my life’). This poem is intelligent and funny, yet it risks boxing itself in by marketing a stereotypical speaker who is a sort of licensed clown: Me not no ...”

“... This Spanish-English criss-crossing is important for Marías, and not only because he taught at Oxford and is the Spanish translator of Conrad, Stevenson, Sterne and others. If Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is the best French novel in the English language, Marías’s works must be strong contenders for the title of best English novel in ...”

“... encountered Bampfylde. Another Wykehamist, Huddesford had been briefly a fellow of New College, Oxford, before having to vacate his fellowship because of an impetuous marriage. In London, his ambitions turned to painting and he studied with Sir Joshua Reynolds. It was no doubt Huddesford who introduced Bampfylde to the painter and who in 1777 commissioned ...”

“... thought. Southern suggests that the English schools he must have gone to would have been, even at Oxford, more provincial, less up-to-date, less specialised than the Paris ones, but they would also have been opener, contained more variety, and given more opportunity for a scholar to follow his own bent. Grosseteste’s work up to about 1225, according to ...”

“... exhibition devoted to Freud prints and drawings which will open in May at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and will then travel to four other British venues and on to three museums in the United States of America.* Much of this article arises from conversations which I have had with the artist whilst writing on the early drawings and since seeing the Hay ward ...”

“... heroine Suzy is born in 1956. She has an older sister, Fran. In 1970, Schwarz takes up a chair at Oxford and becomes even more renowned. Trailing in his academic baggage train are his two daughters. The professor also has two wives. The first dies of a stroke in America in the Sixties, and makes only a very faint impression on the narrative. The second does ...”