“... to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five office. He prefers the Oxford system whereby the colleges appoint the academic staff (after consultation with departments) so that nearly all dons are fellows of a college. At Cambridge staff are appointed by the faculties and departments, and colleges are free to offer (or not to ...”

“... than down. The broad outline of his story is well-known. The young Archer shines in athletics at Oxford, gets into the papers as an ebullient fund-raiser for charities (though questions are raised about his percentage of the take), and then enters Tory politics as the late Greater London Council’s youngest-ever councillor. The Louth by-election ...”

“... tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the ...”

“... language, but when it was published in 1939, it was not expected to do well. Collingwood warned Oxford University Press that it was ‘destitute of all that makes autobiography saleable’. It was going to be a ‘dead loss’, he said, and in a preface he offered a pre-emptive apology: he was a philosopher by vocation – had been as long as he could ...”

“... well-known names the better. Thus, when Graham’s soon-to-be-estranged wife Vivien is parked in Oxford early in the war, we are told: ‘She had begun her collection of dolls’ houses, and included among her Oxford friends A.L. Rowse, Lord David Cecil, Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod, Neville Coghill, and A.J.P. Taylor and his ...”

“... soft, Michael Dibdin’s first person narrator a Sixties ditto gone sour. In the Sixties he was an Oxford drop-out (‘universities weren’t where it was happening, and particularly not Oxford’). Two decades later, part of the time spent in South America, he is back in Oxford as a ...”

“... must have been conscripted at the same point in the war, but being older he had already been up at Oxford: now he was a graduate, starting a BLitt. Since he was already quite famous in university circles I knew who he was although we had never met. I remember being impressed by his clothes. In those days after the war clothes were drab; grey flannels as common ...”

“... the press. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua he describes how he was hounded by newspapers when he left Oxford on what proved to be his way to Rome: After Tract 90 the Protestant world would not let me alone; they pursued me in the public journals to Littlemore. Reports of all kinds were circulated about me. ‘Imprimis, why did I go up to Littlemore at all? For ...”

“... Rose Macaulay loved semantics and her most precious possession was her 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary: ‘my bible, my staff, my entertainer, my help in work and my recreation in leisure,’ she wrote to Victor and Ruth Gollancz in a rare display of feeling, after they had replaced the copy destroyed with the rest of Macaulay’s flat during the Blitz ...”

“... of Scottish poetry. When we compare Watson’s volume with its main competitors, the Penguin and Oxford anthologies, it is clear not only that these are out of date, but that they are products of an age when cultural imperialism among publishers seems to have demanded the exclusion of Gaelic verse. John MacQueen and Tom Scott, who edited the 1966 ...”

“... of Dr Arnold, and he was haunted by the dreadful prospect of falling short. Annie couldn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, but set about remaking the world for the women who came after her. It was assumed that her talented brother would conquer the world as it had already been made. A distinguished career at Oxford was seen as ...”

“... a decayed churchyard in Whitechapel High Street, London El, to a mound of ancient earth in Oxford, and to an ancient earthworks in Cambridge too. This structure the novel counter-poses with other trios, triumvirates and sundry trivia: you can, if you feel like it, draw up a diagram of the novel’s secret structure to prove it, I have, and I must say ...”

“... it is intended to, no less and no more.’ This quotation, cited with evident approval in the new Oxford Miniguide to English Usage, sums up just about all the popular misconceptions about language which nowadays make dictionaries sufficiently lucrative for publishers to vie with one another to produce them in all shapes and sizes, and for all pockets in both ...”

“... On 10 May 1933 an undergraduate at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, wrote in her diary a description of the clothes she was wearing on that sultry summer’s day. The description includes the phrase blue celanese trollies. The diary entry in question was not published until 1984, by which time the diarist, Barbara Pym, had become a cult figure in English literary circles ...”

“... defining characteristics of the short story for both V.S. Pritchett, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, and Walter Allen, in his critical survey, The Short Story in English. ‘The short story,’ writes Allen, is ‘rooted in a single incident or perception’; its effect ‘is nearer to that of lyric poetry than the novel’. And ...”