“... why the recycled wartime spiritual pep talks of a lapsed Belfast Anglican turned myth-cultivating Oxford don should, more than fifty years later, be a bestseller among born-again American Evangelicals is a pretty question for cultural history. Partly because Lewis was an inveterate if selective autobiographer, and partly because there have been several ...”

“... revised 2006), the Complete Pelican (2002), the Everyman Signet (1992-96), the Norton (1997), the Oxford (1986, revised 2005), the Portable (2007, a boxed set in paperback of an edition first published in 1992 and revised in 1997) and the Riverside (1974, revised 1997). This last is described by its publishers, Houghton Mifflin, as ‘the beautiful ...”

“... racism’; and the continuing coercion and induced movement of labour. The new Oxford History of the British Empire presents a more up-beat version typical of the age of Imperial sunset. An attempt to construct a positive memorial to Empire, these volumes engage only spasmodically with the ‘post-colonial’ debates of the last twenty ...”

“... refused passports. We should cease to pretend that they can be translated. The reader of the new Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation can only be relieved that the English poets represented in it had never heard of that rule. Jonson, Dryden and the rest, like the bumble-bee who has never understood that his flight is contrary to the laws of ...”

“... Harrogate, and he acquired a strong sense of himself as Jewish without acquiring the religion. At Oxford he read Greats and got a brilliant first, but was unsuccessful in his two attempts at the All Souls fellowship examination. He was thought of as a candidate for appointment as a philosophy don, but he had formed the intention before arriving at ...”

“... I must begin by declaring an interest. I am quoted twice in The Oxford Book of Death. This gives me a sort of literary immortality, like the poets I had to read – or, on occasion, copy for punishment – in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury when I was a schoolboy. Now I am alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky ...”

“... In the late 1950s, when I went up to Oxford, one of the liveliest and most provocative lecturers in history was Lawrence Stone of Wadham. He was already a controversial figure who had, as we all knew, crossed swords with Hugh Trevor-Roper over the state of the Elizabethan aristocracy and with Geoffrey Elton over the question of Tudor despotism ...”

“... In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious than the last, that would kill him within five years. The usual treatment in the 1930s was less effective than modern medical intervention but rather more enjoyable ...”

“... he enters one or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from Magdalene ...”

“... conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s ...”

“... non-smoker, vegetarian, buttoned-up loner and through forty years the most disliked don in Oxford. A rogue English aristocrat, family man, soldier, historian, journalist, MP and PM, drinking, smoking, eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close ...”

“... burdens – so he was free to continue his education abroad. He read Classics at New College, Oxford, taking only a pass degree. Feeling more at home in Oxford than in Boston, he set himself to shed his American identity and acquire the appearance and accent of an English gentleman. Here his efforts were largely ...”

“... I spent almost forty years of my life in Oxford. Seven years ago on my retirement I left Oxford and have hardly ever been there since. Much has changed. Dinner at Magdalen College now has only three courses, an economy which we resisted even during the Second World War. And of course there are girls everywhere ...”

“... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law ...”

“... Most​ UK-based academics who don’t work at Oxford or Cambridge have at some stage experienced the turbulence of university restructuring. In my case, it happened at the University of Glasgow in 2009. The twenty or so departments and research units in the Faculty of Arts were told to reconfigure themselves as four multidisciplinary super-schools ...”