“... shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using ...”

“... He was Reader then Professor of English Language at Leeds, then Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 until 1945, then Professor of English Language at Oxford from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. In his time, he was recognised as the world’s leading expert on Beowulf, and in his time, he probably knew more ...”

“... Bettaney. Poor Bettaney was off his rocker from an early age. Though he was clever enough to go to Oxford University, he could not contain his twin obsessions: Adolf Hitler and alcohol. Observers in Oxford pubs would ask him to be quiet when he clicked his heels to attention at the bar or broke into not very tuneful ...”

“... office in 1904, as the son of a Cambridge mathematics don. His mother had been educated at Oxford – early days for such a distinction though those were, for a woman – and was a suffragette and a socialist. There were four children – an elder brother and two younger sisters. The elder brother, Frank, was early and universally regarded as ...”

“... It is the same old story of the young Boy Scout, Nonconformist and Liberal. He says he joined the Oxford University Labour Party (though not the Labour Club) in time for the famous 1939 by-election, but since he gets the name of the winner (and his precedessor) wrong, his memory may be at fault. Wilson’s shift to Labour came, I would suspect, later, during ...”

“... plunges Alice into a grief which she assuages by study so effectively that she gets a place at Oxford, and there finds herself courted by a popular young schoolmaster. Roland teaches well, believes in leadership and games, and thinks in his old-fashioned way that women are a jolly good idea even when, like his Alice, they have quite a decent brain. When it ...”

“... Hailsham himself is the fitful nature of his political involvement. He was an MP from 1938 and the Oxford by-election onwards: ‘Bobby Bourne the Deputy Speaker coming out from Church had suddenly felt tired, sat down on a rock, and died.’ But much of his time had been taken up with war service and after the war he had been rather more of a lawyer than a ...”

“... most famous for the cloth trade, which gave Tyndale plenty of support during his life. He went to Oxford, where he discovered Erasmus, and perhaps to Cambridge as well. Around 1523 he left Gloucestershire for London, and tried to persuade the learned Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, to let him translate Erasmus’s New Testament into English. When ...”

“... above short extract will elude the otherwise literate reader (five of them are undefined in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I cannot find even a cognate for the tongue-twisting ‘rhamphorhynchus’). Richard Feynman supposedly turned away requests to explain quantum physics with the jest that if you were smart enough to understand how he won the Nobel ...”

“... as it does, curiously enough, in An Unmentionable Man. When samples of Mortmere reached Oxford, the court of Auden was spellbound. Stephen Spender later on recalled that ‘just as Auden seemed to us the highest peak within the range of our humble vision from the Oxford valleys, for Auden there was another ...”

“... of, the temptation cannot be resisted. I turn off and head for a pub a block to the south of New Oxford Street. It has a pinball machine which I have been playing a lot in the last few weeks. This particular model is called ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. Its slogan is ‘Love never dies.’ All these machines have storylines, most often based on the imagery ...”

“... recently read ‘Islam and the West’, the text of a short address given by the Prince to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, a body of which he serves as patron.* (Royal seals are not wanting in King Charles’s old royalist military HQ: the other two patrons are the House of Saud and the sultan of Brunei, the latter best-known for his under-the-table ...”

“... Bodyline tour of Australia. To recapitulate very briefly, Mr D.R. Jardine (Winchester and Oxford) devised a tactic to stop Donald Bradman’s run-machine by ordering two fast bowlers (Larwood, H. and Voce, W.) to bowl at his left shoulder. The batsman was forced to preserve his health (and often his head) by using his bat as an inadequate ...”

“... the lecture on feminist theory or the talk by Minister Farakhan. Some campuses, like Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, and Macalester, in St Paul, Minnesota, are served by bookstore-cafés, which double as literary salons; others inhabit a wasteland of thrift shops and greasy spoons. Faculty lifestyles and manners vary widely as well. At Queens College, in a ...”

“... He was not spoilt – he was cut off from his family’s fortune as soon as he was expelled from Oxford. ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, the pamphlet he wrote in 1820 (it wasn’t published for a hundred years) starts with a brilliant short history of the world and its culture which could hardly have come from a history-hater. He was not a fanatic ...”