“... who, even by the time he encountered him in the mid-Sixties, had already become something of an Oxford character. But that does not blind him in any way to his old tutor’s faults. Bennett’s mind, he roundly declares, ‘ran to conspiracy, intrigue, blackguarding’, and quite sufficient evidence is given of the impact his various machinations had on his ...”

“... who had paid for the seats in the stalls’. Part of the subtext even was political – the Oxford Union vote about not fighting for one’s country was quite recent – but, like the homosexuality, it was designed to be mildly thrilling without giving offence. The blandness was an ironic reflection of the hidden toughness of the author himself. Because ...”

“... him.’ The ’45 seems to have spooked Adam Smith. He had just spent a miserable six years at Oxford, itself a hot or at least warmbed of Jacobitism, acquiring that English veneer that had eluded Hume and Ferguson and the other Scots literati. He may have thought as he rode north to his home town, Kirkcaldy in Fife, in August 1746, that he had made a ...”

“... E.P. Thompson dedicated Whigs and Hunters to ‘Christopher Hill – Master of more than an old Oxford college’ he was recognising Hill’s stature as a historian, academic and public figure. From his perch as Master of Balliol, he presided over the education of future mandarins and exerted an influence on the intellectual life of Britain. His work, which ...”

“... case for keeping it within the family and he accordingly gave thought to bequeathing it to either Oxford or Cambridge University. At that point the beady-eyed Elias Ashmole appeared on the scene, cunningly ingratiated himself and managed to fool the less worldly Tradescant into appointing him (as Tradescant supposed) a trustee who would ensure that the ...”

“... Mitford piece, ‘Why is a debutante?’ (1930), in the mood of Evelyn Waugh. And the Countess of Oxford and Asquith on ‘Changes I have seen’ (1935): she didn’t really see any, because anything of consequence happened inside her own front door. She had ‘an ardent desire to know everyone of interest and character’ from the earliest age. God help the ...”

“... 7(a)(b)(f)(g)(i); 8(e); 9(a); 11(n); 12(a). When Alister Hardy began his career in Zoology at Oxford, the Rev. W.A. Spooner was presiding over New College. Whatever the proclivities of his fellow students, it surely cannot have been Hardy of whom the story is told that he upset the Reverend Doctor by ‘hissing all his mystery lectures, and tasting a ...”

“... Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert knowledge of experimental work in animal behaviour and the relevance of experiments on animals to human neurology and psychology. The book is lively, clear and sophisticated in its arguments, and is without a trace of ...”

“... business of the aims and respective roles of that duo of almost impenetrable opacity. Oxford and Bolingbroke, in negotiating with the Jacobites, and with Hanover, and in the framing of the infamous Restraining Orders which, we are told, gave rise to the legend of ‘perfidious Albion’. It is Gregg’s thesis that ...”

“... mere ‘flapdoodle’. In 1932 he was exasperated at the thought that a clever young man with an Oxford fellowship (which he clearly envied) was going to waste his time by writing a book about a frothy ideas-monger like Marx, whom he dismissed as ‘a typical Jewish half-charlatan who got hold of quite a good idea and then ran it to death just to spite the ...”

“... which deeply impressed T.S. Eliot. So deeply, in fact, that Eliot offered to persuade the Oxford University Press to publish Knight’s essays and to write an introduction for them himself. The result was The Wheel of Fire, one of our century’s seminal books on Shakespeare. At the same time Eliot sent Knight an inscribed copy of his poem ...”

“... traced by Fraser. She examines four phases: the attempt to rejoin religion and aesthetics, in the Oxford Movement; the bridging of self-consciousness and transcendence, in Hopkins; the extension of religious truths to morals and art, in Ruskin and Arnold; the new ‘religion of art’, in Pater and Wilde. This useful study identifies certain strands in the ...”

“... Whitehall garret into a home for the ad hoc ‘Strategy Unit’ consisting of himself and a female Oxford philosophy don. Her earnest tutorials on the nature of happiness turn into practical experiments as Summerchild stealthily furnishes the garret as a love-nest. Whether or not such a hideaway with its kitchen facilities and trap-door onto the roof is ...”

“... to domesticate the new worlds opened up by Columbus and da Gama. The 1658 catalogue of the Oxford Botanic Garden declared: ‘As all creatures were gathered into the Ark, comprehended as in an epitome, so you have the plants of this world in microcosm in our garden’. In Oxford (founded in 1621) this ark took the ...”

“... of corpses. All this by way of prologue to what’s unique about the late Sidney Greenbaum’s Oxford English Grammar. It does not, to begin with, treat the grammar of English as a withered version of the grammar of Latin. Nor does it set forth some rules and then contrive neat illustrations. No, most of its numerous citations ‘are taken from two ...”