“... She briefly rebels by becoming an Oxfordian, with the additional tweak that she thinks the Earl of Oxford collaborated with a Jewish moneylender to write the plays. Meanwhile Arthur the son, our hero and narrator, rebels in a more conventional way by hating Shakespeare and his father. He uses the injunction from the Sonnets to ‘make sweet some vial’ as ...”

“... Birmingham University, were designed as ‘business’ universities, explicitly opposed to the Oxford and Cambridge model. These local relationships, however, tended to decay, partly because the universities themselves increasingly became national institutions, detached from their localities, but more because of the decline, especially in the second half ...”

“... profound change in cultural sensibility. Having grown up in a family for whom the debates of the Oxford Movement were still alive she found herself in the 1960s taking guitar lessons from one daughter and reporting to another on the Eurovision Song Contest: ‘Quite exhausted by emotions raised . . . We felt sure Cliff should have won, though doubtful ...”

“... C.R. Ashbee, quickly elbows them out of the way. Bosanquet, Beveridge and that crowd of ambitious Oxford students for whom settlement work was a stepping-stone to Whitehall make way for Oxford House’s Winnington Ingram and the celibate slum priests who spent their lives bringing ‘brotherly love’ to the poor. The ...”

“... last faltering attempts to keep hold of the allegiance of students and their teachers in Oxford and Cambridge; without a sufficient sense of what it felt like to struggle as Sidgwick did with the question of where reticence about our doubts turns into simple duplicity, it is hard to appreciate the peculiarities of both his style and his doctrine. One ...”

“... had little time for an avant-garde writer like Green? Besides, Green was just the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war. The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His ...”

“... of disasters. His behaviour alternated between defiance and misgiving. In 1810 Shelley went to Oxford, where he met and beguiled Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and languished over his rejection by his cousin Harriet Grove, who was frightened by the unorthodoxy of his ideas; he was soon sent down for co-authoring, with Hogg, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ (though ...”

“... in which, say, G.S. Gordon, when he succeeded Walter Raleigh as Merton Professor of English at Oxford, ‘was said to have got the job largely on the strength of his Lit Supp contributions’. In that first year of the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by Constance Fletcher, who wondered how James’s novel would do ‘for short railway ...”

“... were still popular in the 16th century, and were sold as standalone pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around ...”

“... a little. At one point Nevinson recalls his meeting with Tupra in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. I thought: wait a minute, didn’t they meet at a party? No – but Tupra and Deza did meet at a party in one of the books in the trilogy. Smiley’s people aren’t, of course, just one person. And then, about halfway through the book, I found myself ...”

“... studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in itself a creative and interpretative ...”

“... what words like ‘metaphor’ meant. He knew what ‘trepidation’ meant. They had told him at Oxford. He had the education. He wasn’t going to let you forget it. I asked myself: Why not cut your losses and get out now? But no, I told myself: because you’ve got something to offer too. Otherwise why would the oh-so-famous Amis be available at ...”

“... Fire Trial of 1933. With the outbreak of the war they moved from Paris to London and then to Oxford, where I came to know them. Catherine drove a motor ambulance until her lungs troubled her. Michael founded a society of radical and Communist Hungarians in London, not very successfully. His activities met with much disapproval at the Foreign Office, a ...”

“... The Newcomes, published a decade after Cousine Bette, it is not an expensive architect but an ‘Oxford Street upholsterer’ who is responsible for the interior of Mrs Clive’s new house in Tyburnia: ‘Roses and Cupids quivered on the ceilings, up to which golden arabesques crawled from the walls.’ There were ‘countless looking glasses’ and you ...”

“... his car, his passport, his father’s old jacket) during an event he set up in an empty store in Oxford Street. It was an intriguing happening, and effective, even if the moral didn’t have quite the bite it would have had if it had been a prelude to hermit-like seclusion. I don’t know where this drawing has been hung but there must be ministries in which ...”