“... But it also goes back to his upbringing, one of tranquil discipline in the large family of an Oxford doctor. As a boy he loved nature as much as art, and he came to draw animals exquisitely. It was Webb who contributed the animal figures to the early patterns and glass of the Morris firm, along with furniture, household goods and ‘table glass of extreme ...”

“... antiquarian (who had made a fortune from paper manufacture), Evans read modern history at Oxford. When he failed to win a college fellowship despite a first-class degree, he turned to travelling in Eastern Europe, combining his interest in archaeology with service as Balkan correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Investigative journalism, then as ...”

“... that it would be many long months before I would see my family again or take up my scholarship at Oxford. It was a miserable moment when I looked out of the window of the train carrying us to the troopship in Southampton, only to see the towers and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s ...”

“... king of Spain’s daughter. The nature and the manifestations of case are the subject of the new Oxford Handbook; anyone who wishes to understand the phenomenon of case from any point of view will find something of interest in its 57 chapters (not counting the introduction) by 62 authors or co-authors. The breadth of treatment will be apparent even from the ...”

“... free not only of possessions and a large mortgage, but also of his wife Vivien, who decamped to Oxford, where she stayed at Trinity College and was miserable. Greene’s dutiful monthly visits were, she suggested, the equivalent of ‘the termly tea out with relations’. In London he led ‘a chequered and rather disreputable life’ going to the Windmill ...”

“... writing was done. Apart from a single letter from Philip to his young brother, Robert, in Oxford, urging him to keep up his studies and promising to send him part of ‘my toyfull Booke’ (the ‘Old’ Arcadia, then in progress), there’s little indication in these letters of Sidney’s devotion to poetry, or music, or storytelling, or the visual ...”

“... habits, riding on the top of carriages rather than inside, became a vogue among the dashing ‘Oxford sparks’ of his day; but opium-eating didn’t apparently hold similar thrills for the dandy culture. What was it precisely, then, that De Quincey was the first to do – and, given the instant popularity of the Confessions, why had somebody else not ...”

“... being appreciated only in Surrey. Nevertheless, it is still funny that Nancy’s aesthete Oxford friends, invited home for the weekend, should be ‘shaken like rats’ by Lord Redesdale (the father), told they were ‘hogs’, ‘sewers’ and ‘damned puppies’ (‘I’d rather take a housemaid shooting than you, Lord Clive’) and swiftly ejected ...”

“... match most people’s idea of the country’s strongest research universities: in REF 2021, Oxford, UCL and Cambridge got the most money, followed by Edinburgh and Manchester. Taking part isn’t compulsory, and smaller institutions focused on teaching have little to gain financially, but in practice a REF submission is seen as a necessary part of being ...”

“... were a Shiite with your Rome-equivalent, once beautiful Kerbala, irretrievably injured, and your Oxford-equivalent, Najaf, flattened in parts, and your family decimated in circumstances of horrendous civil war, would you thank Bush? If you were a citizen of Baghdad, in 1989 judged the most healthy city in the Middle East, now experiencing cool spring turn ...”

“... rude to God. There was a legendary mock-funeral in King’s Parade. Richard Wollheim, who was at Oxford, approaches Boxer slowly by way of de Hoghton, the rich fat poet, maintaining, rather against the evidence adduced, that de Hoghton was interesting and talented. He is said to have got his poem into Granta behind Boxer’s back. When Wollheim finally gets ...”

“... from his adopting the cause of the strikers in the General Strike of 1926, while he was still an Oxford undergraduate, through his experiences as a WEA lecturer at Nottingham, his teaching economics at University College, London, his fighting an unsuccessful campaign at Chatham before his adoption by the safe Labour constituency of South Leeds, his becoming ...”

“... inevitably seems to give rise amuses him more. Some of the characters – a particularly appalling Oxford English don, for example – lead a double life, partly Arthurian and partly, one suspects, drawn from the life. There is also a Turkish lecturer deep in Hazlitt, a Japanese translator and his English original, the sexually versatile Italian professoressa ...”

“... avoiding the confusion, heterogeneity and abundance of old-style museums like the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, some of what they shared with the street has gone: an ability to feed the imagination with unexplained, comical, sinister and melancholy juxtapositions, for example – the aspect of collecting the Surrealists exploited. Storrie is good on the relation ...”

“... to a better washed, if chilly population. The bathroom in the first flat we rented at the end of Oxford Gardens, a couple of houses away from the Portobello Road, was half a floor down the common staircase. It was certainly the coldest bathroom I have ever lived with. Changes to the interior usually took place without leaving any mark on the front ...”