“... The publication of this work, following closely on Professor Leonie Kramer’s Oxford History of Australian Literature with its two supplementary anthologies, marks not only a new development in the standing enjoyed by Australian writing in the world but also a radical change in the point of view from which literature written in the English language must henceforth be treated ...”

“... if it is experienced, it hardly lives up to the concept: madrigals I heard once on the river at Oxford by night involved merely damp, and mosquitoes, and an occasion all innocent pretentiousness. And yet a good many people feel, and are surely right to go on feeling, that they know all about water-music, simply because of Handel. It is surprising how much ...”

“... some weeks now I’ve been standing at St Giles Circus – the junction of Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road – watching people try to pass from one side of the road to the other. Given that we are now in 2015 – and have traffic lights, generally decent shoes and pavements ...”

“... Evening Standard, who, on the scent of celebrity masturbation, had splashed (under the headline ‘Oxford Don Takes Memoirs In Hand’) his account of a ‘strange occasion’ in 1944 in the Italian hills. The beauty of the day, the blue sky and the snow ‘struck directly at my penis, so I sat down on a log and masturbated; it seemed the appropriate ...”

“... In these columns six years ago, among a chorus of praise for the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, OED2, Charlotte Brewer entered a dissenting opinion (3 August 1989): The riches stored in the two previous dictionaries are now much more accessible, and reviewers have already reported how delightful it is to browse through one of the 20 handsome volumes of OED2, and ponder, marvel or cavil at individual words and definitions among the extraordinary wealth of examples recorded on its pages ...”

“... be made for Maurice Bowra? In his day, and it was a long day, he was the most celebrated don in Oxford, and therefore in England. Born in 1898, he became a fellow of Wadham in 1922; he was elected its warden in 1938, holding that office, astonishingly, until 1970; he died a year later. He wrote or edited some thirty books, mostly ...”

“... In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who lived two buses away and went to a different school ...”

“... humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly’. But it opens with great generosity, even warmth. I begin with ...”

“... biography, close reading, theory), none of them historical enough. After accepting Oxford University Press’s invitation in the late Seventies to edit Byron’s poems, McGann prepared himself, with the old Germanic thoroughness for which his first university, Chicago, is famous, by reflecting on the history of editing from the Enlightenment to ...”

“... archives of Europe. ‘During the twenty years in which I was at work,’ he told students at Oxford in 1892, I must have read, made extracts from, or copied with my own hand tens of thousands of manuscripts … often in cipher for which a key was not always at hand. I worked long in our own Record Office … the archives at Paris, Brussels, Vienna and ...”

“... When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of Latin at University College London. In his application for the job he very properly drew attention to his Oxford failure ...”

“... he remained throughout unsure whether it really existed. The Movement (a rather localised, mostly Oxford affair) and the Angry Young Men (more London, more of the theatre) were certainly the inventions of journalists, but they took on a kind of reality when the public was induced to view the young men in terms of those inventions, and also when the writers ...”

“... Has the art of our century an identity of its own? Is it consistent? Has it common interests? The Oxford Companion to Art, published in 1970, is not helpful in answering these questions. It has no entry for ‘Modern Art’ while the title of the new companion, the Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Art, also edited by Harold Osborne, cautiously avoids the issue ...”

“... because, so it was said, of his ‘tactless and intemperate’ attack on the Regius Professor’s Oxford Book of English Verse. In Nigel Williams’s film about Q and the Leavises recently shown by the BBC under the improbable title The Last Romantics, Leavis is seen being greeted with roars of student laughter when saying, during a lecture, that the ...”

“... spend his adolescence on acid is Douglas Murray, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, who’s written a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. Tina Brown flew all the way from New York to meet young Douglas (Murray not Alfred) before buying the US rights to the book. It’s been embargoed till 15 June, but presumably it’s all right to reveal ...”