“... mistaken. Powell was entranced by a romantic dream of England. In the mid-Seventies he came to Oxford to give a talk about devolution, which was then all the rage, but which he saw as a way of diddling the Scots out of their oil. Partly because of Powell’s earlier fury against Schoen’s researches, I went along and got myself invited to ...”

“... A captious person might mutter that The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe is a little ‘hobbitical’: it reminds one of Professor Tolkien’s hobbits, who ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’. This would be unfair, in that it is a splendid volume, presenting contemporary scholarship to the general reader with care, grace, much thought and many illustrations; filled with things that most general readers won’t know at all, and that many specialist readers won’t have thought of ...”

“... English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College). Despite the influence of his English teacher at Shrewsbury, he was more hearty than aesthete and chiefly distinguished himself at Trinity by his feats on the river. As he later put it, ‘I went up for my first term, determined, without ...”

“... of psychological repression and did not prevent him from daredevil jumps off high railings at Oxford, or the small leap that he took at 66, exacerbating an angina condition and bringing on his death. He was on his way to catch a horse-drawn tram at Dingle Bank, where he was visiting a Liverpool sister. Nor did all his social climbing, his delight in ...”

“... translator of Virgil was Gavin Douglas, whose Eneados was completed in 1513. Although my Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature appropriates Douglas as the earliest translator of the classics ‘into English’, his version was of course written in Scots and is an ennobling monument to Scotland’s separate cultural identity. For Douglas, Virgil is ...”

“... Scotsman.’ Johnson began, ‘Sir ...’ but Boswell persisted – ‘and that the University of Oxford would publish it.’ ‘Sir,’ thundered Johnson, ‘in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.’ Johnson’s Dictionary should be seen (and perhaps this reprint will make the view more possible) as part of various 18th-century ...”

“... a present-minded concern to stress that Britain’s role is global not European. The forthcoming Oxford History of the British Empire, a massive and important work, has already been attacked by sections of the Tory press on the grounds that its American editor, international contributors of both sexes and striving for balance are bound to make it a ...”

“... were morally good. So when The Renaissance was published in 1873 it was a scandal, at least in Oxford. Pater was a homosexual Oxford don who lived with his two sisters, and scandal was anathema to him. The subjects that he treated – Pico della Mirandola, Botticelli, Leonardo, Du Bellay, Winckelmann, among others ...”

“... to Smith Square and joined the Labour Party himself. Later that year he went up to New College, Oxford, to begin a degree course in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. After an interruption in his studies due to war service in the RAF, the dashing young socialist was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947 ...”

“... has no counterpart abroad. He lingered on – still does – though the rambling houses of North Oxford built to accommodate the new families of married fellows stand as monuments to the social changes that inaugurated his decline. His love objects were not usually girls, though John Betjeman, sighing over thighs, caught the authentic tone of enraptured and ...”

“... of dogmatism’.At home Darwin came under fire from Edward Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a leading figure in the Tractarian Movement. Pusey preached a sermon, which he then published, in which he not only attacked evolutionary theory, but impugned Darwin’s motives, accusing him of using science merely as a vehicle for his hostility to ...”

“... with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings. Inside, Oxford University Press have thoughtfully provided a sticky-back presentation label, since most of these monuments will no doubt end up as gifts for clergy (I pity the Archbishop of Canterbury in particular). They give something of the flavour of the ...”

“... composed the works contained in the collection edited by Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight. The Oxford Francis Bacon is a major scholarly project conceived by the late Graham Rees and administered nowadays by an editorial advisory board of 16 experts under the direction of Brian Vickers, the leading Baconian scholar. Early Writings 1584-96 is the seventh ...”

“... Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend Joseph ‘Spanco’ Spence in Oxford, ‘it has been the talk of the Town and the Country and small beer and Bread & Cheese to my friends the Garretteers in Grubstreet for these few days past.’ Jason Kelly, writing for a transatlantic audience, goes to greater lengths to account for this ...”

“... be seen as another form of disdain for the bourgeois humanist subject. If you were, say, a stoned Oxford undergraduate in 1995 (a state Derrida himself might not have judged too harshly: hadn’t his translator judged it OK to have him write of memory in the Phaedrus ‘letting itself get stoned by its own signs’?), you might have caught yourself suspecting ...”