“... and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I should adapt my activities to maximise the faculty’s performance in the RAE, and when I contrast it with the oppressive micro-management which has grown up in response to ...”

“... success. The grandson and son of undistinguished Conservative MPs, Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he defeated Dick Taverne (later a Labour MP) and William Rees-Mogg (later the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice ...”

“... of Rembrandt and Velázquez. The conventional wisdom on this development is summarised by the 2001 Oxford Companion to Western Art: ‘From the time of his marriage Millais abandoned Pre-Raphaelite teaching for a broader, more painterly style and Pre-Raphaelite seriousness for vapid sentimentality … which pleased his Victorian audience and ensured worldly ...”

“... the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly tested his nerve. What he provides ...”

“... they say does not support the views imputed to them. The author of the entry on animals in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that ‘chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,’ and that there is strong evidence that ‘dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.’ Someone must have ...”

“... graduates but with younger folk welcome. We talked about this for the next few months, mostly in Oxford pubs, and with a show of efficiency we divided what we wanted to be considered into six lumps to fit six weeks of an eight-week university term. That would give us a week in hand, or even two, if we found ourselves overrunning our theme-a-week ...”

“... is now) from which it later transferred to London. I must have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London I took Knightsbridge to be ...”

“... route to Tyburn Tree snaked through Holborn and St Giles, then went along Tyburn Road, today’s Oxford Street. It was dense with spectators. At Tyburn itself, a hundred thousand people might be in attendance, jostling one another for standing room, teetering on ladders, sitting along the wall that enclosed Hyde Park – all competing for a glimpse of the ...”

“... through time. In The Colditz Myth: British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Oxford, £20), S.P. MacKenzie, who teaches at the University of South Carolina, uses the memoirs, diaries and letters of prisoners to reconstruct their wartime experience, and contrasts it with popular (mis)conceptions. He also, as it happens, gives the other ...”

“... collected in an omnibus edition with a new introduction, under the title The Literary Detective (Oxford, £12.99), in plenty of time for Christmas. And if you go to see Dead Babies, bear in mind that Marvell is played by the director, and that despite Quentin’s voice-over in the film, none of the characters in the novel is the ...”

“... she was kidding, but a Jamesian truth was perhaps not so far to seek: it was widely rumoured at Oxford that admissions standards for foreign students, who pay tuition up to five times the rate of home students, were increasingly lax. According to a recent Guardian report, to prevent a revenue shortfall British universities have budgeted for the number of ...”

“... CB FRGS, first published in six fortnightly parts in 1908, is being reissued this month by Oxford University Press, with notes and an introduction by Elleke Boehmer, who teaches post-colonial literature at Nottingham Trent. In ‘Camp Fire Yarn No. 1’, Baden-Powell describes the inspiration for the organisation: the role played by a ‘corps of ...”

“... were sent by Penelope Fitzgerald to her daughter Tina in 1970-71 when she was an undergraduate at Oxford. The drawings were inspired by Tina’s ‘Klee/doodles’.The Father and the Mother Here are two individuals whohave reproduced their kindand each of them possesses botha body and a mind.They sit upon two separate chairsthey sit between four wallsand it ...”

“... danger of neglecting an essential resource of the Story. Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally ...”

“... allowed to travel to Italy to receive a prize and now she was to receive an honorary degree from Oxford. I saw her in her room in the President Hotel on Russell Square. Anya Kaminskaya, the ‘granddaughter’ who accompanied her everywhere in her last years, was present, and so was the late Amanda Haight, the author of the first and still best English ...”