“... young’. Perhaps Shakespeare and Milton were unmentionable. The edition that appears under the Oxford imprint is in fact bodily the US one, US spelling, printing and all. Only in the blurb on the jacket is there room for manoeuvre, and the publishers take the opportunity to modify their author’s assertion that Aphra Behn was the first woman to become a ...”

“... of Cambridge, who, with his brother, the Regius Professor of Divinity, is general editor of the Oxford History of the Christian Church, is more benign in his approach. He sees the 18th-century Papacy in terms of the cathedral and close of Barchester. This was a mellow world, a sunlit countryside, a stable system and an esteemed institution. The Popes were ...”

“... notice to spell it. A number of characters from Great Britons appear, often informally, in The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes. Orde Wingate is encountered in a very private moment, trying to cut his jugular. Montgomery turns up as a young sword-waving subaltern, capturing his first German with a kick in the groin. Kitchener sits contemplating the ...”

“... and a lecherous uncle. Around 1954, at the age of 16, Robina is sent off to a finishing-school in Oxford, to study French and history of art. On the train journey from Carlisle, she falls in with a well-born young undergraduate, who makes a groping dive for her knickers, and on being repulsed proposes marriage. He is accepted by the ingenuous heroine. At Mlle ...”

“... and many other more minor figures. These were never given their due when, in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement, interest in the ‘pure’ church music of the 16th century was revived, and the main reason was surely that they were not Anglicans. Byrd, Weelkes, Gibbons and the other Elizabethan/Jacobean composers provided the repertoire for the Anglican ...”

“... as Cavendish Professor at Cambridge and Peierls as head of the school of theoretical physics at Oxford. They were both knighted. They both have strings of honorary degrees. Mott got a Nobel Prize in 1977. They say that Peierls would have got one too, if only his contributions to physics had been concentrated in a narrower field. Neither of them has ...”

“... he was typical of the progressive movement, during the 19th century, away from the uniformity of Oxford or Cambridge-educated professional men who undertook reviewing as a gentlemanly pastime. As a Unitarian in his youth, he was debarred from taking a degree at either of the universities, and became one of the first distinguished generation of Victorian ...”

“... Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are ...”

“... back his lovely hair, may be said to have been. He was the son of a Bromsgrove solicitor. At Oxford he failed in his final exams, apparently owing to an emotional crisis which contributed largely to shaping both his future career and his work as a poet. The direct course he might have followed, to a regular academic career in ...”

“... a truly exceptional collection of records. The two principal landlords, the Crown and New College, Oxford, still occupy the same premises, and their records are undisturbed. To supplement these, we have full church court records, and the resources of the Essex County Record Office. The book’s other great advantage is entirely the result of Dr McIntosh’s ...”

“... hot down my neck, and time itself moving along so fast that it seems to be about to lap me, Oxford University Press has produced a dictionary of two thousand new words.* I haven’t learned all the old ones yet. It’s very stressful. There ought to be a word for that second-half-of-life sense of time accelerating out of one’s orbit. The feeling of ...”

“... In his second published poem, ‘Cromwell’ (‘a prize poem recited in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, June 28, 1843’), the 21-year-old Arnold speaks of his own as well as the Lord Protector’s youth of dreamy ‘inaction’ to be followed by a life of work – ‘manhood’s sterner will’. The ‘brazen prison’ and the ‘hot race’ could be put ...”

“... impression that her ‘Cold in the Earth’ is the finest poem in the 19th-century part of The Oxford Book of English Verse. But these achievements were not enough to modify Leavis’s conviction of ‘the divorce between thought and feeling, intelligence and sensibility, that is characteristic of the 19th century’. The poetry of the period, he ...”

“... friendly. The oddest thing I found in tracing this period was that, during it, a delegation of Oxford dons went out to Coimbra to bestow an honorary degree on Salazar. What was that about? Softening him up? While I was waiting through that Princeton summer, Azores negotiations must have been fast and furious. Access was at first granted just in ...”

“... his nephew John Phillips in 1844 (Phillips was later to be a distinguished geological professor at Oxford). Since then, there has been a handful of scholarly articles by Joan Eyles, but otherwise Smith seems to have escaped the attention lavished on those who followed and built on his discoveries. Such scholarly amnesia is curious. Maybe it came about because ...”