“... lay not so much in his writings, as in his presence and his person. During his decades at Oxford University Press and later as an English lecturer at the university itself, Williams made his mark through those he published, those he encouraged and, above all, those he impressed. He struck people as amazing. His energy was famous, his conversation a ...”

“... Unready’ for around a thousand years. Ever since 1066 and All That (originally a parody of Oxford University exam papers) he has also been logged as ‘the first Weak King of England’. The charge sheet includes incompetence, indecision, cruelty, paranoia and even, very un-regally, being a ‘mother’s boy’. In the popular estimation he probably ...”

“... able to ensure that she is given the sanctuary at Jordan College (many of the colleges in Lyra’s Oxford have different names; this is more or less Exeter, where Pullman studied) of which she is the beneficiary at the start of His Dark Materials. Along the journey there are a few too many Lyra-as-Moses/chosen one references, but these are offset by some ...”

“... particle. Dennett had no time for this sort of thing: no magic allowed.Dennett’s supervisor at Oxford was Gilbert Ryle, the commanding presence of mid-20th-century Oxford philosophy. Ryle had argued in The Concept of Mind (1949) that Descartes’s account of immaterial substance was a bad answer to a silly ...”

“... A new edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq. Aristophanes’ earliest surviving comedy was first performed in 425 BC, six years into the Peloponnesian War. The causes of the war were, as causes of war are, complicated ...”

“... of the youth and sheer utopian confidence of Ralph’ – as Raphael Samuel called himself at Oxford – ‘must have appealed to middle-aged men whose moral universe lay in ruins around them.’ Samuel was a brilliant historian and a charismatic but deeply irresponsible man, who had dreamed up the idea but, without telling anyone, spent an excessive ...”

“... There were, after all, many people who were initially deceived by Hitler or attracted by the Oxford Group, but few of them renounced their misplaced enthusiasm quite so openly. He was, given the law and the general climate of opinion, remarkably brave in his defence of the right of homosexuals to follow their nature. He was also touchingly loyal in a ...”

“... universities. He would lament, after he left the BBC, that the BBC no longer held any interest for Oxford and Cambridge. When Oxford at first declined to give him an honorary degree he was as angry and resentful as Mrs Thatcher’s sponsors were half a century later. He still pulled strings to get his son Christopher ...”

“... Rafael Sabatini and E.F. Benson have been given the benefit of one of his handsome and scholarly Oxford selections, and there is an anthology of historical stories still to come. Benson has already enjoyed two revivals of favour in the last 25 years, first in 1968-70 when his Mapp and Lucia stories were republished in hardback by Heinemann and in paperback ...”

“... that his sense of identity and self-esteem was woken when Emile Leroi Wilson, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, shouted at him: ‘Hey you, motherfucker. You don’t talk to black people or what? This place fuck up your head already.’ The main theme of Cambridge was that of the black better educated than his white masters, a condition that Phillips at ...”

“... to earth, where he finds, as his subtitle suggests, ‘A Life in Four Places’. These are Oxford, London, Lisbon and New York. Unlike James, Conrad is a don, but that doesn’t mean he thinks any better of dons than his compatriot. Christ Church gave him an enormous set of rooms to be alone in; what he does in return is to tease it, and spend as much ...”

“... answer of sorts. Late one Friday afternoon in August I was imprisoned in the Bodleian Library in Oxford – as so often in Oxford in August – by heavy rain. Having no work by me, and it being too late to order up further books from the stacks, I took to browsing among the supremely boring items which Bodley’s Librarian ...”

“... S. S. Prawer is Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford. Robert Phillip Kolker is Associate Professor of Film Studies (in the Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) at the University of Maryland, College Park. But don’t let the insignia fool you. Both gentlemen, I suspect, are movie fans at heart ...”

“... impulse’ and ‘moral insanity’ had allowed the would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, Edward Oxford, to escape the gallows three years previously. The doctors, for their part, criticised the M’Naghten Rules for failing to take any account of the unconscious. What, they asked, was the law to do with murderers who were rational, conscious of wrong-doing ...”

“... It is no secret that philosophy as it is taught and studied at UCLA or Princeton or Oxford is very different from philosophy as it is understood at Paris or Dijon or Nice. An intellectual milieu in which the household names include those of Quine, Strawson, Davidson and Kripke is unlikely to have much in common with one where Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida are taken with great seriousness ...”