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“... son begin in 1950, when Vidiadhar Naipaul – called Vido by his family – leaves Trinidad for Oxford, and they end in October 1953, when Seepersad dies at the age of 47, from a heart attack. Seepersad Naipaul, called ‘Pa’ in these letters, was a reporter on the Trinidad Guardian when his 17-year-old son left. It was a gravely exciting time for both of ...”

“... Last year I travelled frequently on the early-morning coach from London to Oxford which passes Sir Edwin Cooper’s pair of Classical municipal buildings in Marylebone. The first of these is the Town Hall of 1914: proudly alert like the lions which guard its portal; perhaps ostentatious like the swollen waistcoats paraded by its original occupants; ‘massive and effusive,’ Pevsner puts it ...”

“... in London with a magic piano. It opened in the summer of 1954, a few months before I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival ...”

“... at the newly-established universities were filled, in the main, with graduates of Ryle’s Oxford B.Phil degree, who devised courses in which logical analysis occupied centre-stage, Hegel and Husserl were written out of history, and post-war trends in French and German philosophy completely ignored. Discontent with the narrowness of such an approach ...”

“... Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not to be confused with St Antony’s, Oxford, which wasn’t founded till 1950; Innes’s setting is a fictional composite of the two university towns), who has been shot dead in his study. The list of suspects is reduced by a process of elimination to four dons, all of whom have been behaving ...”

“... by trade, but despite having a covetable job as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, Robin Collingwood disliked college life and despised academic forms of thought and writing, especially in philosophy. If the responsibilities attached to his job were performed expeditiously, it was only because he refused to give them a moment’s more ...”

“... was awarded the Military Cross, and ended the war, twice wounded, as Captain Howard. Returning to Oxford, where he had already obtained a first in Part I of Modern History, he set his sights on an academic career. But as a result, perhaps, of the distractions of the Oxford Union, and a performance just before finals as ...”

“... In 1934 I came to Oxford from Edinburgh, where I had obtained my first degree. I found the place to be full of left-wing political feeling. The rise of Hitler had provoked many hitherto non-political young people to agitated concern about the future of Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal traditions in which so many of us had been brought up were dangerously threatened: all of this had us seriously worried ...”

“... an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia. Nothing odd about that from an Oxford don now past his seventieth birthday, fiddling with his invariable bow tie, while steadily regarding the follies of the world with an unnervingly non-committal gaze through old-fashioned spectacles. Yet this was also the first telly-don, instantly ...”

“... called his Works except for what has until now been the outstanding one, which was edited for the Oxford University Press by C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson and simply titled Ben Jonson. It was a landmark in the emergence of modern editorial standards. The publication of its 11 volumes began in 1925 and ended in 1952, fifty years after the signature ...”

“... which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from Aboriginal languages as well as modern verse in English by poets from a range of racial and linguistic backgrounds. Growing up in Scotland, I ...”

“... Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective ‘medieval’, pointedly used in its pejorative sense by this philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon. As Anglo-Saxon scholar and philologist Tolkien is not remembered by the world at large, although this is the aspect of his work that W ...”

“... his text of the poem on a later edition.) The book duly wings its way to London on the coach from Oxford, where Warton was a fellow of Trinity College. The accompanying letter recalls that it was ‘picked up’, apparently for sixpence, ‘in a petty shop at Salisbury, where books, baccon, red-herrings and old iron, were exposed to sale’. Warton thinks ...”

“... relatively freely. Many students at Harvard, Princeton and Yale, or at the men’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, held this view. One freshman wrote of the ‘social illness’ he believed to result from intermittent and strained contact with girls. These young men wanted the kudos of a top degree, but they also wanted, as one Harvard student put ...”

“... The publication of this work, following closely on Professor Leonie Kramer’s Oxford History of Australian Literature with its two supplementary anthologies, marks not only a new development in the standing enjoyed by Australian writing in the world but also a radical change in the point of view from which literature written in the English language must henceforth be treated ...”