“... not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from ...”

“... lacerating review) began political life by passionately opposing the Great Reform Bill in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were ...”

“... the rise of Hitler, Jewish scientists lost their jobs. In 1933 Alexander Lindemann visited from Oxford, to try to arrange posts in England for the displaced scholars. Schrödinger, who was not Jewish, said that he also would like to leave the country – a vote of no confidence for which the Nazis never forgave him. But he found it hard to settle down as a ...”

“... of Art, but soon changed tack, moving to study philosophy at Edinburgh University and then at Oxford, where he was taught by Iris Murdoch. Her scepticism about Oxford’s fad for linguistic philosophy was shared by another of Nairn’s future mentors, Ernest Gellner, whose polemic Words and Things drew a connection ...”

“... and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. A year later Oxford began formally admitting women and Time and Tide, the feminist magazine that published Delafield, first appeared. Its proprietor, Lady Margaret Rhondda, a peeress in her own right, campaigned energetically, albeit unsuccessfully, to be allowed to take her ...”

“... My first paid job after leaving Oxford with what we used to call a ‘good’ second (did you ever meet anyone who got a ‘bad’ second?) was as a research assistant at the London School of Economics. My duty was to seek out suitable material for inclusion in a volume of documents illustrating the development of Labour Party policy from 1900 to 1945 ...”

“... were offering) or return home. I remember visiting the cottage somewhere out of Oxford where Dan Davin, Rhodes Scholar, officer, military historian and novelist, got away from his work at the Clarendon Press to do his writing. Propped around his desk were New Zealand maps, newspaper clippings, reference books. Here was an expatriate writer ...”

“... the director Mauritz Stiller; and even then it wasn’t so much a soft spot as a wound. The Oxford Companion to Film says that Stiller was born in Helsinki, but Gronowicz says it was Lvov: for once one believes him. His credentials are that he himself was a Polish Jew from Lvov, and that his family and Stiller’s were connected. He seems almost to be ...”

“... narrative embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena,’ my Shorter Oxford says, adding: ‘Often used vaguely to include any narrative having fictitious elements.’ That seems clear enough, and certainly covers an article recently read called ‘The Myth of President Kennedy’, which says that the assassinated idol of the ...”

“... nothing personal about the Amis/Levin campaign in 1968 to prevent Yevtushenko’s election to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry: ‘If successful, it’ – the election – ‘would have installed a trusted ally, if not a total minion, of the Soviet regime in a highly sensitive and influential slot.’ The highly sensitive slot, incidentally, went that year ...”

“... ambition was formed early, and frustrated by his youth, so a few months were spent at New College. Oxford gave him an early opportunity to join the Labour Club, apparently for hereditary reasons, and to sound off at the Union on Beveridge. Within a few months and a few pages. Benn is off to war, getting posted for pilot training to Rhodesia. The picture of ...”

“... was a student in the Sixties, shops like the Malet Street Dillons in London and Black-well’s in Oxford still sold historical monographs in foreign languages, but to judge from the current monoglot stock of university bookshops in London, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford, neither the students of history nor their teachers ...”

“... I was running dry of ideas. Fortunately I recollected how I had finished my valedictory lecture at Oxford twenty years ago. I arrested my exit, drew myself up and cried as I had done twenty years ago: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh, what a lovely war!’ I doubt whether most of the audience recognised the allusion, but it gave me my exit line. How I wish that Joan Littlewood ...”

“... backlash, that sour and anxious sensation I remember seeing on the faces of a gang of bloods at my Oxford college just after they had finished booby-trapping a swot’s room, and on the less well-bred faces of my barrack-mates in the Air Force when they sent the weediest of our colleagues out on a fake-date with the CO’s daughter – what fun it had been ...”

“... standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely on her own authority would surely seem very patronising to her Harvard audience, as if Cambridge Massachusetts were waiting to get the ...”