“... the first page: I wrote it twice, satisfactory neither time. J.G. Farrell – a Liverpool-born, Oxford-educated writer of Anglo-Irish descent – was living in New York when he wrote these words in his diary on 18 March 1967. He was 32 and had published three novels, A Man from Elsewhere (1963), The Lung (1965) and A Girl in the Head (1967), to only ...”

“... Nancy was on being married to him. Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature at Oxford, where he befriended T.E. Lawrence, whose wartime adventures Graves was to relate in a rather Boy’s-Own style in Lawrence and the Arabs (1927). In the early 1920s he and Lawrence planned their very own Boy’s Own adventure, ...”

“... Leeds Modern, changed the school over from soccer to rugger, pushed more and more boys towards Oxford and Cambridge and even briefly got himself invited to the Headmasters’ Conference. It was all to no purpose as in a few years the school went comprehensive, lost its identity and was merged with the girls’ school next door. Hard to fit myself into any ...”

“... Was there ever, in fact, a ‘Cambridge English’? Not as in ‘Oxford English’, which refers in its most general use to a manner of speaking: but in the sense of a distinctive and coherent course and method of study. There has been an English Tripos in Cambridge since 1917, and an independent Tripos and Faculty since 1926 ...”

“... was never a member of the Labour Party either. He had a lifelong suspicion of Labour, since his Oxford days, when he had been repelled by the ‘peculiarly off-putting … combination of puritanism, Fabian self-righteousness and … unconscious commitment to the protocols of Oxford’s England’ at the Labour ...”

“... wedding present when he married Nancy Langhorne in 1906). Waldorf had been put through Eton and Oxford to become an English gentleman, ‘modest, selfless, wise, prompting quietly in the wings rather than acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like ...”

“... which was at that time still principally an institution for preparing students for entry to Oxford, Cambridge and London. Gissing was a star student until the moment in his third year when he was caught stealing money, and was expelled and then gaoled for a month. He had fallen in love with a young prostitute called Marianne Helen Harrison and known as ...”

“... work of fiction there was a seven-year pause (partly taken up with her immersion in the revised Oxford Companion to English Literature). The Radiant Way (1987) inaugurated a trilogy which continued with A Natural Curiosity (1989) and is now concluded with The Gates of Ivory. Drabble’s progress has been marked by a widening perspective on things. Her first ...”

“... was first published in 1788, was a Jersey man educated at Winchester and Pembroke College, Oxford. His Lemprière ancestors included a lieutenant bailiff of Jersey during the reign of Elizabeth, and a governor of the island under Oliver Cromwell. John was a teenage prodigy who entered Pembroke in 1785 and completed his dictionary at the age of ...”

“... as he tripped up the steps of the clubs in Pall Mall, as he strolled through the quadrangles of Oxford and the courts of Cambridge, as he processed through the cloisters of Canterbury and York, as he marched across Horse Guards Parade and trod the gilded pavements of the City, he must often have glimpsed the footprints of Anthony Sampson, who blazed this ...”

“... errors. (True, none of the Cambridge editors described by McKitterick rivals the severity shown at Oxford by John Fell, who rewrote Anthony Wood’s history of Oxford, studding it with insults directed at Thomas Hobbes.) Like us, they received proofs disfigured by monstrous errors, not all of which they succeeded in removing ...”

“... Twenties but, being Irish and dark-visioned, could never settle for the merely jewelled phrase. At Oxford he was an apprentice dandy but too ‘irredeemably heterosexual’ (in the words of his schoolfriend Anthony Blunt) to fully enjoy the jokes that mattered. In the Thirties, he tried hard to turn himself into a socially-conscious poet but was too riven by ...”

“... to happen: the only child at Edinburgh Academy; the lawyer father just able to find the money for Oxford; the interview for a job at Leeds University, where kind Professor E.V. Gordon, a quiet Canadian, just happened to murmur that he knew of some suitable digs. And at those digs there were already three students, one reading medicine. She married me some ...”

“... the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine. These somewhat unexpected interests inform and animate many of the stories in this first collection, Pleasure. Meanwhile, although the autobiographical element in his work is still strong, a new range of settings ...”

“... with the absence of women’s voices, the total innocence (or cosy arrogance?) of these ‘Oxford Readings’, in the face of what is most energetic and, in its own way, serious in the entire modern tenor of critical, hermeneutic sensibility, leaves one at a loss. And should leave exasperated the audience at which it aims. Not that the undergraduates ...”