“... was a perfectly tonsured young man in full Berber costume outside the old sorting office in New Oxford Street. He lives in Cockfosters and maintains a blog on male trends. ‘If fashion isn’t everybody’s life then I don’t know who everybody is,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not the life of a Masai bus conductor on the roads of Tanzania.’ ‘Are you ...”

“... didn’t build Stonehenge. This makes no difference to events at the solstices nor did it stop the Oxford University Press bookshop from putting up a window display featuring a cardboard model of the stones surrounded by cardboard druids. The wish for a portrait of Shakespeare from life has a similar but shorter history. For centuries the monument in Stratford ...”

“... are held on a database run by a not-for-profit private company called Nominet, which is based in Oxford. When you type https://www.lrb.co.uk into your browser, a few packets of data are sent via your internet service provider to Nominet’s database, which sends them on to a host whose IP address is not www.lrb.co.uk but 82.112.100.113. The data that are ...”

“... that, if not actually Protestant, Chaucer would have been if he’d had the chance. He went to Oxford, Speght claims (wrongly), ‘by all likelihood in Merton Colledge, with Iohn Wiclife: whose opinions in religion he much affected’. In the 19th century Chaucer emerges as a robust patriot, to be disseminated through the schools and libraries of the ...”

“... so far as Cambridge was concerned and I might get the best of both worlds if I were to go to Oxford. This wasn’t altogether the beady-eyed career move it might seem, in that I had a hopeless crush on one of my fellow officer cadets, who was bound for Oxford – that his college was Brasenose, then a mecca of rowing ...”

“... Oxford 1968-9. In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional newspaper, or distributing the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink ...”

“... Oriental Tagore’s did – the humanist Tagore’s star had never appeared in that firmament. The Oxford translations present an opportunity to take stock of Tagore’s achievement and its historical moment. The series not only gives us an overview of the vast range of his work but is a fresh attempt to assuage the anxiety that Tagore has seldom been well ...”

“... the last march I went on was in 1956 and that was by accident: I was standing in Broad Street in Oxford watching the Suez demonstration go by when a friend pulled me in.Today it’s bitterly cold, particularly since the march keeps stopping or is stopped by the police, who seem bored that they’ve got so little to do, the mood of the march overwhelmingly ...”

“... and his life followed a golden thread of educational privilege: the Dragon School, Eton and Oxford – first Balliol College, then the exceptionally advantageous academic environment of All Souls, where he spent almost all of his productive intellectual life. For four decades, even the usual demands of teaching and administration were mostly sloughed ...”

“... in a perhaps more substantial and revealing sense. Here we meet the 20-year-old Barbara Pym at Oxford in the early Thirties (like many others, she found it hard to leave, and lingered on); then on visits home to Shropshire, briefly to Germany, and – more briefly still – to Poland (she travelled more widely than the novels suggest, and after the war was ...”

“... reading English at Cambridge may begin with an essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. At Oxford they tackle In Memoriam. O-Levellers could be confronting Romeo and Juliet and A-Levellers the poems of Herbert. The central question all of them ask of a work is what it means, and answering this question requires practice, effort, and the knowledge of ...”

“... who could write of a little girl he saw in ill-fitting hand-me-downs when he was lecturing in Oxford that ‘nothing spoken about art’ could be ‘of the least use’ to anyone in his audience. ‘For their primary business, and mine, was with art in Oxford, now; not with art in Florence, then; and art in ...”

“... and many only in Cassandra-mangled form. Deirdre Le Faye, editor of the excellent new revised Oxford edition of the letters, defends Cassandra somewhat backhandedly, suggesting that her weeding-out and censorship ‘shows itself more in the complete destruction of letters rather than in the excision of individual sentences; the “portions cut ...”

“... the easily polluted subject of language will allow. One place to seek such fare is the admirable Oxford Companion to the English Language, which, though far from mainly concerned with the history of English, provides an excellent summary accompanied by references to something like a hundred and fifty special articles elsewhere in the book, dealing with such ...”

“... including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices.’ But as a poet Thomas was a significant puzzle to Larkin. ‘I think there is no man in England now who can ...”