“... off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls. Jonathan Cape’s posture is completely understandable given the current funeral atmosphere in ...”

“... in Sudan, they will detain you, either in Queens Building at Heathrow or at Campsfield Prison in Oxford, before deporting you. And under the Carriers’ Liability Act of 1993 airlines are fined £2000 for each passenger they bring to Britain without a valid passport and visa. Both these restrictions were British innovations which other European countries ...”

“... companions, it is clear that Hawking was an exceptional student. He did unusually well in his Oxford entrance exams, and continued to do unusually well as an undergraduate, excelling, in Oxbridge fashion, without great apparent effort or enthusiasm. He seems to have been directionless and more than a little vain, but he was unarguably clever. Still, the ...”

“... Victorian drift to doubt. Aged 21, still a Frenchman, he served a year in the French artillery. At Oxford he became president of the Union and was hailed ‘the Balliol Demosthenes’. All Souls’ refusal to grant him a fellowship – did the examiners shy at that statuette of the Blessed Virgin on his desk? – left him with a grievance for life. In 1896 he ...”

“... one another and producing only confusion where I am searching for clarity.’ Sharif arrives at Oxford in the 1950s and maps the future with other aspiring post-colonial leaders. After years of travelling round Europe with a beautiful jazz singer, he returns to build an independent Sudan; but political conflict causes him to flee to France, to a decaying ...”

“... conversion to High Anglicanism, a source of comfort bolstered not only by the histrionics of the Oxford Movement and the incense-laden interior of All Saints, Margaret Street, but less predictably by the writings of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan. When it comes to sex he is for once almost apologetic, regretting that he had not been more ...”

“... John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the chief reviewer of the Sunday Times, a BBC sage, a sought-after chairman of panels, a man well known for his strong opinions on all matters to do with literature and the other arts ...”

“... when they did finally commit themselves, fighting on the side of their own supporter the Earl of Oxford, it was the wrong one – Lancastrian, at the moment when the Yorkists emerged triumphant. It was the younger brother who was the charmer of the family. Confusingly, he too was christened John, perhaps, as Castor suggests, because both brothers had ...”

“... their achievement with photographs. They discovered that Blunt had recently given a lecture in Oxford and had been the guest of Francis Haskell, the professor of art history there. Haskell was obviously suspect, since he had a Russian mother and a Russian wife and had been to King’s College, Cambridge, so the press surrounded his house, making it ...”

“... monasteries to be cathedrals for the first time: Westminster Abbey, Gloucester, Peterborough, Oxford, Bristol, Chester. This was the most substantial change to the Church of England’s structure in the whole Reformation. Of the older cathedral priories, Durham was the most spectacular; its splendour signalled its bishop’s unique status in England as a ...”

“... Leyland workers, are interminable and unassuageable. ‘The hearties wrecked my pretty rooms at Oxford.’ ‘We would have been beautifully compatible but Class came between us.’ ‘He got cold feet and went back to his dismal wife.’ ‘My trouble is that I come too quickly.’ ‘My trouble is that I can’t come at all.’ Etc, etc, ad nauseam. And ...”

“... vantage. Henry Pearlman, the cold storage magnate whose collection has been transported to Oxford, got to know modern art backwards: his first serious purchases in the 1940s were of Ecole de Paris work from two decades earlier, and it was only later that he reached out for Manet and Daumier. He steered clear of Cubism and let go of a major Matisse ...”

“... The exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford until 8 January, Claude Lorrain: The Enchanted Landscape, brings to one gallery three of the most haunting canvases of the 17th century. One belongs to the museum: Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Silvia, which was probably still on Claude’s easel when he died in 1682, just as old as the century ...”

“... in circling flocks, are remarkably good at avoiding one another. Even in the human river that is Oxford Street they rarely bump. It’s a natural ability that should be ...”

“... imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonald ...”