“... Plautus were dropped from the syllabuses of many schools and universities. As an undergraduate at Oxford studying classics in the early 1990s, I was never asked to read any Roman comedy, and my tutors never made any mention of the genre. The Greek Old Comedy of Aristophanes, on the other hand, was a hot topic. It is not hard to see why Roman comedy should ...”

“... of his actuality’. Big editions, such as the still far from complete Longman Poems, or the Oxford Poetical Works (now up to Volume IX), or the rather less authoritative Ohio Complete Works (now up to Volume XVI), join in the process of ennoblement. But they also exert a countervailing force, helping us to imagine how the poems might have looked before ...”

“... The Emperor in the Roman World (1977). A stocky heavy-headed young man, I used to see him at Oxford seemingly always on his way back from squash. I knew at the time he was formidably clever and from a distance (with me it was always from a distance) fancied him rotten. On reflection, it was partly his name I found so glamorous, but at this age and with ...”

“... driver and an English nurse, he was abandoned by his parents at sixteen and dropped out of an Oxford degree in philosophy and theology. He worked as a policy adviser on human rights to Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, before founding DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis, a maths prodigy and computer games programmer turned neuroscientist, and Shane ...”

“... phase of his career. The row over his failure to obtain the Regius Chair of History at Oxford had been followed by a seismic controversy over his book on the origins of the Second World War. I half expected to find a smell of fire and brimstone in the air, and my knees were knocking together as I climbed the last few steps to his rooms in the New ...”

“... Slave of the Passions ponders the great question whether there is life after graduation from Oxford. Or, more precisely, after graduating from Oxford without a glittering prize. Grace Ritchie – ‘a doll with teeth’ – just misses a first in PPE. Discovering that you are only worth a ‘good second’ is, the ...”

“... the Modernist attack on Victorian poetry has endured longer than most. In his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) Yeats summed up his generation’s complaint: ‘The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against irrelevant descriptions of nature, the scientific and moral discursiveness of In Memoriam – “When he ...”

“... D.J. Enright recently celebrated his 70th birthday. In commemoration, Oxford University Press have prepared a rather lean Selected Poems, and a volume of personal reminiscences and critical essays about Enright’s life and work by a variety of writers. This festschrift’s title, Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation ...”

“... part of the story is adapted, very movingly, from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.) At Oxford, and desperately poor, Oscar is serenely confident God will provide, and so he does, at the race track and dog fights and the card table. A toss of a coin convinced him that God needs him as a missionary to New South Wales: he embraces the notion fervently ...”

“... Raymond – conceivably have come up with a plot in which a highly-regarded, if disappointed, Oxford don first mixes an explosive cocktail to be drunk by his own Church, on being taxed with it denies all responsibility for his action, then in fear of exposure takes his own life, and finally, as the Archbishop of Canterbury is translated into a St ...”

“... Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though Michael doesn’t know this yet. It’s taken Michael ten years to summon up Julia, so when the two buses move out of synch and he loses her ...”

“... have asked that question seems to indicate that that point has not yet been reached.’ It is like Oxford philosophy. The jury files out to deliberate further and out we file to do reverses on shots already filmed. I am in the corridor two hours later when the verdict comes through. A man walks through the policemen shaking his head in ...”

“... as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s Classics paperback. The potential for psychological delicacy and intellectual irony of the genre that Fanny Burney virtually invented in Evelina, though she neglected to take it out of the corset of the epistolary ...”

“... school which they left early to study German in Berne. Both got firsts in modern languages at Oxford and went into the Foreign Office as a cover for intelligence work. It is at this point that fictional divergences take over. Cornwell (according to one published source) worked for MI6 in Germany, from 1960 to 64. Pym, we gather, is a senior spymaster, who ...”

“... facts were vividly illustrated in a Report, sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation, which the Oxford Department of Education had produced in 1960. When 374 pupils in French lycées, and 335 in German gymnasien, were asked to compile an imaginary Baccalauréat or Abitur in which they were allowed to drop all but four subjects, and to choose those four ...”