“... Birmingham schoolboy who was always to maintain that he really was born on his first day at Oxford. The time to which Ken Tynan bore a symbolic relation was the quarter-century following the Second World War, during which the generation of grammar-school children to whom the Education Act of 1944 opened Britain’s older universities created a new ...”

“... and the following summer Augusta came to London in need of Byron’s financial help. Lady Oxford had recently ended her affair with the poet and returned to her husband, and Byron could not resist the ‘irreplaceable joy’ offered by his sister. In an account written after the marriage collapsed, Annabella claims that, within hours of their wedding ...”

“... are indeed detestable, and don’t even have the flat-tongued straight face with which an Oxford friend of Connolly, gazing upon the most porcine of all Connolly photographs, once murmured: ‘It’s a pity he’s not as nice as he looks.’ In that mode of feline understatement, nothing can overtake the words of Kenneth Clark (who was all eyes), that ...”

“... a literary critic. So it is with Lionel Trilling, whose complete works are now appearing from the Oxford University Press. There is indeed a novel, and a few short stories, besides the works of literary history and criticism, but it is not chiefly by these that he exceeds the limits of the man of letters. It is as a critic of culture, habits of thought and ...”

“... Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition ...”

“... and scientific ‘revolutions’ of the period. Bullough and Grierson, the editors of the original Oxford Book of 17th-Century Verse (1934), spoke of ‘the intrusion of the intellect, a spirit of enquiry impatient of traditional, conventional sentiment’. Their successor, Alistair Fowler, prefers not to think in terms of a root-and-branch reform of poetic ...”

“... than stockbrokers, conscientious objectors can be patriots (‘I’ve been a Fabian since Oxford,’ one of them tells Hannay, ‘but you’re a better socialist than me’) and the ordinary Turk or German is a decent chap at heart. In Mr Standfast, the apocalyptic scenes on the Western Front give all the peoples of the empire a chance to show their ...”

“... extended to older composers. He was irked by Vaughan Williams’s preferential treatment at Oxford University Press, where Walton was otherwise the star. It made him susceptible to attempts at poaching by Boosey & Hawkes – a long, furious letter to Walton from Hubert Foss, his OUP publisher, written in 1937 at the time of the first such overture, is ...”

“... In their very different ways, the three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency ...”

“... obscenity) was perpetuated in adulthood to sustain the language of their intimate acquaintance at Oxford. The hundreds of letters to Monica in part confirm the tailoring: Larkin is candid and funny and affectionate in them (as well as sardonic, bitter and despairing). However, Motion demonstrated that Jones, as well as Larkin, found high enjoyment in ...”

“... up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed ...”

“... that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar. Lord Mansfield, as Murray became, spanned the 18th century in more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an ...”

“... of the guild used by craftsmen. By the early 13th century, the universities in Bologna, Paris and Oxford were already thriving; around 750,000 students matriculated at European universities between 1350 and 1500, by which time sixty institutions had been established. The popular misunderstanding of medieval and early modern universities is that they were ...”

“... savant. Names, faces, addresses. Street numbers. This book must have made a lot of people nervous. Oxford contacts who went on to higher things. Old mates, such as Rick Lambert (future editor of the Financial Times) and Chris Patten (dog-fancier and last governor of Hong Kong). They needn’t have worried. Marks’s memories are doctored like Hansard. He ...”

“... lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on Mount Everest. Mallory had given his lecture many times. At its ...”