“... has propounded a theory or compiled an anthology on a particular theme ...’: the editor of The Oxford Book of Death may have flinched from an Oxford Book of Irony, but he might have taken as a model Aldous Huxley’s lovely lasting book Texts and Pretexts, with its fine title (modest and radiating) and with its ...”

“... from one location (a database, a book, the brain of a teacher) to another. Reading English at Oxford with John Bayley had been more like learning to build boats on the river Xingu. There was no obvious method in the way John Bayley taught, and no manipulation. I suspect that being a teacher did not interest him. Talking to people about ...”

“... he is as great a loss to the Parliamentary Labour Party as he ought to be to the electors of Oxford. Taken together, the books point to the way Labour could regain mass support, as the party of community socialism – the only reasonable alternative to the way we live now. Evan Luard accepts that socialism has lost its bearings as a force for moral ...”

“... that appeared in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of ...”

“... remaining documents in her own hand. Among other matters, it summarises and comments on Ruskin’s Oxford lectures on Greek science and art known as The Eagle’s Nest. Variations from the published version suggest that she might actually have heard these quite difficult addresses. That cannot be: there must have been an intermediary. One does, however, have ...”

“... are intricate pieces of rhetorical and narrative management. This largely escapes from view in the Oxford Book, which prints hardly any of the most finely articulated examples in full. Not a single poem by Pope is given complete, for example. We seem to have lost the taste for such things, as well as for the more primitive simplicities, preferring briefer and ...”

“... of General Linguistics. His translator, Roy Harris, is also a professor of General Linguistics, at Oxford, having earlier been professor of Romance Languages there. He is Oxford’s first professor of General Linguistics, not because he has occupied that chair for an indecently long time but because it was an indecently long ...”

“... in John Cowper Powys and David Jones by Jeremy Hooker of Aberystwyth University. Readers of the Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English will have noticed how Jones and Powys, these two men from southern England, seem alike, extravagantly bardic, by comparison with the sharper, terser poets around them – in English translations from the Welsh. Powys and ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS ...”

“... image through the land. Thus the Longman text: The Hind and the Panther quotation is from the Oxford text, which retains the original typography and spelling. To bring them up to date is no doubt the general editorial policy pursued in the Longman Annotated English Poets series, for which these are the first two volumes of a projected four-volume ...”

“... the righteous fervour of a Victorian schoolmaster laying on the cane for the good of his victim. Oxford’s refusal to award Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree in 1984 hardened attitudes into mutual petulance. Ever since, ‘reforms’ have been imposed by the Government with a severity amounting to contempt, and accepted by the universities with a resentment ...”

“... of us down below. His press release describes him as ‘a member of the Modern History Faculty of Oxford University’ and Millennium, his blockbuster on the history of the world, as a ‘highly acclaimed’ bestseller, while translations of his monographs and reference books are ‘pending in twenty languages’. But he is not just a historian. He is also ...”

“... then – after entering graduate school at Columbia – she dropped out and became a secretary at Oxford University Press. ‘She wrote advertising copy and won a company-sponsored essay contest, whose prize was a trip to England,’ Salter tells us, and adds: ‘It, and a follow-up journey around Europe a few years later, when she quit the ...”

“... Another thing worth remembering is that practically every one of its leading figures had been to Oxford or Cambridge and could, therefore, be seen to have at least a foothold in the establishment they were criticising: in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been ...”

“... enthusiastically of the ‘ordinariness’ of her world, which is not the general view of North Oxford and the posher bits of London. Some who live in such places can afford to see life as deliciously haphazard and higgledy-piggledly, a sentiment which might not have struck a Victorian housemaid. Not many Johannesburg miners rejoice in the richly blooming ...”