“... average of 25 per cent: only the University of London, Glasgow School of Art, Cambridge and Oxford have fewer. But if anecdote rather than statistical fact is the preferred currency of the HMC, they could ask any teacher at any state school about intelligent, motivated pupils being overlooked by their first-choice universities; and I could tell them a ...”

“... mind the age of the author. But – as I suspect Stothard, who starts her undergraduate degree at Oxford in the autumn, will within a year or two be the first to admit – it isn’t really good enough to be published. And it would no doubt have been politely rejected were Stothard not, in the words of her publicist, ‘a hugely promotable young ...”

“... to cowed batsmen. A batsman known to Short Cuts decades ago was sledged one day in the Parks at Oxford, by Fred Trueman no less, as he went out to bat wearing a Harlequin cap: ‘Another jazz ‘at,’ swore the Fiery one, ‘Ahm going to plaster thee to the effing ...”

“... Stephen​ Spender had spent two terms as an undistinguished student at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest card in his hand ...”

“... dead, the Red Army entered Bulgaria. Did Frank’s membership of the party, which he’d joined at Oxford at the instigation of Iris Murdoch in 1939, have to do with his execution? In E.P.’s account, this question looms large (Edward had joined the party in 1942 before being called up). He believes the answer is yes and argues that while Frank was in ...”

“... let himself be tricked into giving it up; she herself sneaked her way onto a Classics degree at Oxford, only to find herself defeated by the sterility of academic work. She wants to tell us about the job she got after that, and the party she went to, and the awful writer she slept with, mainly to shut him up. She wants to tell us why she likes living in ...”

“... Towards​ the end of 1997, Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend Derek Mahon from Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘Amigo, Here briefly, at the fall of the leaf,’ he began, archly but affably. ‘The deer-park misty, the choir angelic, the heart aswim.’ Mahon had just published The Yellow Book, a collection of long-lined, sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle ...”

“... In​ 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford book ...”

“... 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself ...”

“... naked stream, cold and chill. ‘Remembrances’ is printed without punctuation in the six-volume Oxford edition, as are all the other poems, but Bate adopts light punctuation where the sense requires ‘some form of pointing’. In the last line of this passage the addition of the comma foregrounds the pause after ‘stream’, as Clare’s vernacular voice ...”

“... and when it did appear it was for many years outside the universities: for half a century no Oxford or Cambridge scholar produced anything comparable to Grote’s history of Greece and his work on Plato and Aristotle. Although Classical education flourished in the public schools and in the ancient universities, critical scholarship had little part in ...”

“... pews were too small) must have been a little surprised that she chose to read the lessons wearing Oxford sub-fusc. Sayers, one is 100 per cent certain, had no idea that she was making an ass of herself by dressing up like a character in Gaudy Night: after all, she was a character in Gaudy Night – and in all her other books, including The Man Born to be ...”

“... his frequently-retrieved memory of the ‘public-school Marxists’ he had despised (while at Oxford), and also his man-of-the-people Uriah Heep admission that ‘I never got beyond that whacking great footnote on the second page of Das Kapital.’ I turned (not for the first time in my life, since I had had the benefit of a public school education) to ...”

“... of relationships carefully and devotedly nurtured; some of these friends, notably the Earl of Oxford and the Queen’s physician, Dr John Arbuthnot, helped protect him from his detractors. After Pope’s death, he found friends among writers who could not have known him. Samuel Johnson’s Life (1781), though often dismissive of poems we now ...”

“... ascribed the beginnings of all the most characteristic and prestigious English institutions: Oxford University (though few can seriously have believed that), the Royal Navy, universal education, experimental science and by extension the Royal Society. Furthermore, by ‘burning the cakes’ he demonstrated what was felt to be the quintessential English ...”