“... into an academic activity of a reassuringly familiar kind that can be done as effectively in Oxford or Chicago as in Florence. Edgar Wind himself was an exceedingly learned man. His publications are full of untranslated passages in Latin and Greek, with long discursive footnotes. But these often serve to obscure the extreme shakiness of his ...”

“... venerable policy of obscurantism (by a pleasant lexicographical accident, the word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary immediately follows ‘obscenity’) was forced on librarians by the irresistible pressures of society, although many, no doubt, wholeheartedly agreed with the principle. But it had the practical effect of suppressing not only the books but the ...”

“... of already-existing urban as well as rural communities. At its best, in places like Durham and Oxford, conservative planning has improved the environment. As a result, England today is ‘more beautiful and pleasanter than it was in 1939’. Even more than environmental planning, the English ‘collective good’ of sports culture warms Allison’s ...”

“... career is less than riveting: from various sources we already know too much about life at Eton and Oxford in the middle of the 19th century; and at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, too, though of course there is always room for one more horrifying medical detail, and this she supplies. She seems to have an unnecessary fixation, too, on what people ate for ...”

“... the pair of them have become grand figures, Larkin still has the Amis model on his mind. When the Oxford Book of 20th-Century Verse clocks up sales of 85,000, this is ‘chickenfeed compared with Lucky Jim’. On the other hand, Larkin is delighted to find that his entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations outnumber ...”

“... to hear that they were really ignorant sycophants. If a young woman with degrees from Yale and Oxford has written a feminist critique of the beauty industry which becomes a best-seller, and she’s pretty to boot, how comforting to hear that she’s ‘a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass’. If a Marxist professor with a chair at ...”

“... 2015. He has also picked up political skills that Johnson was supposed to have learned at Eton and Oxford, but plainly didn’t. Johnson’s supporters in the House of Commons have had many disappointing reality checks over the course of his short premiership, but none can have been more distressing than the sight of their leader flailing around at Prime ...”

“... been pleased to return home to Austin, where – after his childhood in Cornwall and degree at Oxford and teaching in Zürich and London – he had been living for the last fifty years. He owned a flash pair of cowboy boots, but not a Stetson. Austin and the University of Texas were at their very best when Middleton arrived there in 1961 as a visiting ...”

“... on AbeBooks recently was £200. The copy in my own university library was long ago purloined. Now Oxford has published a new edition. The book takes its title from a line in Browning’s The Ring and the Book; its thesis, tested on the poetry of the Brownings, Tennyson, Hardy and Hopkins, is that poetry (in particular, Victorian poetry) can make much of a ...”

“... I have always liked hanging around courtrooms. In the Crown Court in Oxford in the late 1970s, I happened on the trial of a racist agitator, who had festooned the streets of Leamington Spa with posters depicting Britons of African ancestry as apes. He was charged under the Race Relations Act with inciting racial hatred ...”

“... became an extension of my flâneur-like activities in the city on my visits from London and Oxford. I travelled both second and first-class. A second-class ticket cost two rupees, first-class 17 rupees. In second class, you usually had people in part-time employment for companions; in first class, whose interior was usually identical to second ...”

“... the Sorbonne and a first boyfriend who took her provincial style in hand and then left her, to Oxford, to Aldermaston, and via Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to the watering hole of the New Left at the Partisan in Carlisle Street in Soho. It’s a fair geography of the early 1960s. People had begun wandering about, and unless you stayed put, you were bound ...”

“... tone. Like many of his generation who had been well-schooled in the ‘examination culture’ of Oxford and Cambridge, Annan never lost the tendency to rank the individuals he discussed (‘the outstanding theoretical economist of Our Age’; ‘the most impressive of all the Marxist historians’): ‘The Nation Sits the Tripos’ was Collini’s idea for ...”

“... political economy, of which I know a little. I can teach you infinitely less than any person at Oxford,’ she continued with uncharacteristic modesty, ‘but I think we might think things out together, which is sometimes quite as fruitful.’ Perhaps it was Violet Paget’s intensity which scared Ottoline off; perhaps it was the ox tongue stewed in ...”

“... It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by his old school’s boys’ club in Limehouse, to which he gradually devoted all his time, becoming extremely knowledgeable about the social ills of East London. He became a full-time social worker ...”