“... in passing by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez in On the Dot: The Speck that Changed the World (Oxford, £13.99), an excellent history of another underexamined typographical mark, that Tomlinson – though employed by the US Department of Defense at the time, and on the surface a player by the rules – was secretly a pataphysician, or follower of the ...”

“... they will try any trick to catch your eye. Series and reprints – Everyman, Penguin Classics, Oxford Reference, Persephone, Faber Poetry, the books of any established author, series of textbooks and so on – do their high kicks in matching costume. But there are now too many publishers for any of them to trust to a brand image to sell new ...”

“... first generation of girls able to compete for the benefits of higher education. After attending Oxford High School she was a home student at Somerville. In 1882, she got a first-class degree in English, the first of Thomas Arnold’s female grandchildren so to distinguish herself.At Oxford she met another offspring of a ...”

“... cut much ice, while Old Etonians, according to Masters, ‘compel attention all their lives’. At Oxford, Aspinall nevertheless compelled attention, and belonged to a glittering group of gamblers, ravers, spendthrifts and eccentrics which included Margaret Thatcher, whose enterprise culture of the Eighties, with its poor view of poverty and failure, must have ...”

“... for 35 weeks in the year in boarding schools, and from there passed to the seminaries of Oxford and Cambridge. From the age of eight they were introduced to two mythologies – that of the Bible and that of Ancient Greece. Try as Jowett might to reconcile the two moralities, they were soon put asunder. There was Arnold coining the terms ...”

“... to see de Quincey’s departure from this world for an erratic studentship at Worcester College, Oxford as evidence of a young man playing at being the tramp before safely entering into family estates. Educational institutions had lost their charm for him, and he was to leave Oxford in 1808 without completing his ...”

“... at present made up of ten men and two women, all white and all but one educated at some point at Oxford or Cambridge. Reed is not the outlier here, having completed a doctorate at Oxford after taking a law degree in his native Edinburgh. With Lady Hale and Lord Kerr no longer on the court, Reed is the only justice who has ...”

“... detached from its moral application, states: ‘Quod Dumbar at Oxinfurde’. Did Dunbar go to Oxford during the 1501 trip? It is unlikely. The stream of Scots studying at Oxford seems pretty well to have dried up after the foundation of three Scottish universities in the 15th century. And Scots were not popular in late ...”

“... the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps this is as it should ...”

“... in Woolf’s rhetoric: ‘The whole iniquity of dictatorship,’ she writes, ‘whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent.’ In Three Guineas the 1850s slide imperceptibly into the 1930s. Woolf’s phrase for the ladies of the mid-19th ...”

“... in translation in the school library. In 1925 she won a place to read English at St Hugh’s. But Oxford was not the liberation she had imagined. Following a scandal, most of the college staff had resigned, and the rump was unimpressive and mainly concerned with penning in the female students and keeping them from the freedoms male students enjoyed. All-girl ...”

“... precocious, reading his way through his father’s library before entering Balliol College, Oxford as a scholar in 1931. University prizes plus a fellowship at All Souls followed his graduation in 1934, and after a two-year interval as a lecturer at Cardiff he, almost inevitably, returned to Balliol as a tutorial fellow in 1938. The college was to ...”

“... much later, knowing that I would have refused to leave. Instead it was: ‘Off you go, apply to Oxford, apply to Cambridge.’ I applied to Oxford, and got a place. My girlfriend was at Camberwell Art College – her father had become a diplomat in London – so that was undoubtedly an inducement. But by and large, I ...”

“... Larkin had about his parents (‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’), by Oxford and adulthood they had modulated, says Motion, into ‘controlled but bitter resentment’. This doesn’t stop Larkin sending poems to his father (‘I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference’) and sharing his thoughts with his mother (‘that ...”

“... clubs’. A series of happy accidents (chronic illness, a small legacy) enabled Bergonzi to enter Oxford. A good degree admitted him to ‘the institutional system of English literature’. Unlike those of his contemporaries whom he most envies (John Wain, Kingsley Amis), Bergonzi never managed to break out of the institution. As he admits, it was too ...”