“... In his recent book Reasons and Persons the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is inclined to decide that persons have no existence, and that the motives to morality are for that reason clearer and more cogent. So-called personality is a matter of self-interest: bees in a hive have no moral problems. Examining their own world and using their own vocabulary, empirical and linguistic philosophers quite naturally and rightly come to such conclusions ...”

“... the few thousand? In September 1984, an international conference on Polish-Jewish Studies, held in Oxford, tried to answer these questions. The papers presented on that occasion have been republished in The Jews in Poland. In spite of the differences between an academic conference and a conversation between an old Jew and a young Pole, the two books give very ...”

“... Gilbert Ryle, who died in 1976, was for many years a professor of philosophy in Oxford. He was a man of genially military appearance, with a knobbly, cubic head; rather soldierly in speech and manner, he punctuated his sentences with an abrupt half-cough, highly characteristic of him and much imitated. He was an exceptionally nice man, friendly, generous, uncondescending, unpretentious, and, for a well-known professional philosopher, startlingly free from vanity ...”

“... and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class origins who became the foremost British lieder-singer of his ...”

“... published in the year before he assumed the Regius Professorship of Greek in the University of Oxford, one was his Inaugural Lecture of 1960, and the remainder were written subsequently. I say this not as a prelude to yet another bad joke about ‘the other place’ but because it is impossible to appreciate the two volumes without some understanding of ...”

“... a scholar’s soft spot for verse-epistles and nonsense rhymes, he seemed destined to become an ‘Oxford poet’ in the narrowest sense. Perhaps coming down from Oxford, like Auden, with a Third, and being forced out into the world, helped him to avoid this fate. But the way forward can be found, in any case, in the most ...”

“... first published in 1910 by Pater’s original publisher, Macmillan, had no critical apparatus. Oxford, where Pater spent virtually his entire career, might have been expected to fill the scholarly gap, but an attempt to bring out a critical edition foundered some time in the 1990s. Rumour attributes the failure to disagreements among the editors, but it ...”

“... pensions make academic careers increasingly inaccessible to those without private means. The Oxford vice chancellor, Louise Richardson, recently took the unprecedented decision, apparently under government pressure, to criticise a student group after it cancelled an invitation to Amber Rudd because of her role in the Windrush scandal. Yet when the ...”

“... research and the creative and tech sectors – places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Oxford and Cambridge. Not long ago informed opinion held that the internet and other communication technologies would spell the end of the city. Why would anyone put up with all the bad things in urban life – the crowds, the noise, the expense – when they ...”

“... alternate with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a ...”

“... exploration of a city: Calcutta in A Strange and Sublime Address, Freedom Song and A New World; Oxford and Bombay in Afternoon Raag; Bombay in The Immortals and Friend of My Youth; London in Odysseus Abroad; Berlin in Sojourn. His own sensibility was primarily formed by Calcutta. ‘The Calcutta that I’d encountered as a child was one of the great cities ...”

“... a scholarship at City of London School and then, in 1941, an exhibition to St John’s College, Oxford. Three years in the army interrupted his studies, such as they were (he and his new Oxford friends, including Larkin, spent a healthy amount of time keeping their distance from the boringly old-fashioned English ...”

“... of Down) though they were given distinctive shape by his classical education at Marlborough and Oxford. Probably no poet since Milton has been as preoccupied with the Pauline injunction that time should be redeemed and talents put to use. When he catches himself ‘killing time’ in I Crossed the Minch (1938), a book about visiting the Hebrides, he is ...”

“... Fernald had ‘died as a prisoner in Austrian hands’. Fernald had gone up to Trinity College, Oxford in October 1915, where he immediately joined the Officers’ Training Corps. Not much interested in his studies, he applied for a commission, stating in order his preferred branch of service – artillery, infantry, cavalry (but explicitly not the ...”

“... floor. III Ghost of a ghost, of you when young, you waken In me my ghost when young, us both at Oxford. You, the tow-haired undergraduate With jaunty liftings of the hectoring head, Angular forward stride, cross-questioning glance, A putty-faced comedian’s gravitas, Saying aloud your poems whose letters bite Ink-deep into my fingers lines I set in 10 pt ...”