“... of the arch little poets whose presence embarrasses the later pages of Q’s first attempt at an Oxford Book of English Verse. Eleanor sounds a jolly girl, unremittingly flirtatious before and after marriage, and a source of some anxiety to her august in-laws, and particularly to Emily, the Poet Laureate’s wife. Lively Lionel, who had romped with her since ...”

“... authors began to call Maria Theresia by the name she was given at the font. Only a decade ago, Oxford University Press refused to allow authors to do so; and Cambridge, apparently, still does if we are to judge from Professor Beales’s subtitle. I cannot believe him conservative enough to prefer Maria Theresa if left a free hand, for he is no less bold a ...”

“... It had always been so. John Heath-Stubbs, in his Hindsights, describes a visit by some young Oxford poets when Lehmann was staying in Cambridge. ‘At the end of the evening it appeared that an error had been made in booking the guest rooms at King’s, and that there was one too few.’ Lehmann offered his window-seat. ‘In view of ...”

“... 52 poets represented in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets fail to make an appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. On its own, of course, this doesn’t prove a thing. At the same time I would guess that these poets are known about today – if they are known about today – simply because they were once biographised by Dr ...”

“... is really rather shocking. What was behind it? The first thing to note is that Lawrence went to Oxford. As an Oxford man myself, I have no hesitation in identifying Aldington’s main problem as being that he did not: he went to University College London. ‘Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an ...”

“... and had published nothing, save the odd poem, for a quarter of a century. In 1821, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, he had brought out a volume called The Improvisatore, which was followed in 1822 by a verse drama, The Brides’ Tragedy. But he was so ashamed of the former, which contained lines such as ‘The snow is falling featherily’, that he ...”

“... poetry will not stand up to rational scrutiny. Thus in 1964 he writes that he is ‘talking at Oxford on verse craft as opposed to poetry’; and, more dismayingly: ‘my view is that one can achieve a command of one’s language by continually thinking about it at all historical levels and in all social gradations. But to write poetry one must love and ...”

“... of cancer tests. Dorothy, a working-class housewife, is given a clean bill of health, Pamela, an Oxford lecturer in Medieval literature, is told she has only a few months to live. The novel traces their doings over the ensuing summer and autumn. At the insistence of a clergyman friend Pamela makes a pilgrimage to Walsingham to pray for cure. Later she goes ...”

“... provide a case for a politicised service. The book under review refers to the high proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in our higher Civil Service as well as in successive Cabinets, and the authors write: ‘If recruitment to élite positions is based on criteria which are no longer acceptable to society at large or if the persons recruited to them ...”

“... In 1956, when he was 22 and about to go up to Oxford, Ved Mehta finished an autobiography, Face to Face: a provisional one, naturally, under the circumstances. In 1972, he published Daddyji, a life of his father. Daddyji was born circa 1895, but the book reaches back to the birth of the grandfather, and beyond: though the beyond is rather shadowy ...”

“... in the 1970s was the transformation of the history workshops held at Ruskin College, Oxford from ephemeral, marginal, near-clandestine activities into a permanent, recognised and well-publicised part of the contemporary historical scene. The most significant evidence of this development was the appearance of the History Workshop Journal, the ...”

“... his Christian name because his mother was an illegitimate daughter of Edward VII. At Eton and Oxford there was always someone in love with him, but because of his preoccupation with the horrors of homosexuality, he suppressed his feelings and never went beyond a return kiss. He had sisters too, the way travellers in hot countries have tropical ...”

“... Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as slightly marring the solemnity of the occasion by irresistibly suggesting a group of caricatures by Max Beerbohm. Shortly after this Gosse hurries off to Paris on ...”

“... he was indoctrinated in childhood in the crudest form of Evangelical belief. As a young don at Oxford, he came under the influence of Newman, and all but went over to Rome; but at the last moment he recoiled, reacting so violently in the opposite direction that, though he was a clergyman and became the head of his college, he virtually lost all ...”

“... by Caroline Seebohm. It tells the story of four privileged young women whose lives converge at Oxford in the early Sixties, before leading out into the bigger, badder world of marriage, America, disillusionment. As the title might suggest – and the jacket illustration of our foursome a-punt, with dreaming spires in the background – this is a very ...”