“... lazy, which is why, having repeatedly failed the easy examination in Divinity then compulsory at Oxford, he went down without a degree. He enjoyed best, and studied energetically, what others neglected to know – not only forgotten Victorian architecture, but the verse of Philip Bourke Marston or that of Ebepezer Jones (whom Mr Hillier, by an un-Betjemanian ...”

“... the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century. The case for ...”

“... it was the place itself that was emigrating beneath our feet.Now, as I walk from my house in Oxford to the hipster coffee shop on Magdalen Road, which has recently been rivalled by two more hipster coffee shops, a deli and a second sourdough bakery, I pass Silvesters, a hardware shop that has finally closed down after a hundred years on what was once a ...”

“... a story. Two, actually, and at some point they blend together. There are rivers and trains, Oxford and a town near Hamburg. Also, the night train to Milan and a lovely Italian breakfast. The river in Oxford – he can’t remember the name; but the birds and fritillaries in bloom . . . He remembers the purple ...”

“... of an ethologist is a pair of binoculars. With these, Tinbergen and his colleagues, largely in Oxford, have indeed been able to make many novel and interesting observations of the habits of animals. They have found it desirable to invent a special terminology – ‘sign stimuli’, ‘innate releasing mechanism’ and ‘action specific energy’ – some ...”

“... time a group of former Rhodes Scholars at Yale privately offered to give homes to children from Oxford and Cambridge University families. Oxford accepted; Cambridge asked for time to consider (I would like to know more about that). Our own voyage was arranged, under my father’s direction – he was at the time warden of ...”

“... citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the gallows ground now known as Marble Arch. His action sprang from a moral impulse and not, I am convinced, from any desire to raise property values in the area known as Tyburnia. However, I gather from The London Rich that the ending of this ...”

“... to be factual at all. We learn at page 131 that in 1949, after taking a degree in Modern Greats at Oxford, Turnbull arrived in India to conduct postgraduate research in Indian social philosophy. In the course of the next two years he sat in on discussions at Banaras Hindu University, and at several religious ashram, including that of Sri Aurobindo in ...”

“... Volume IV of the ‘Oxford Chekhov’ has all the fiction published between March 1888 and 1 January 1889, and it brings to an end Ronald Hingley’s nine-volume annotated translation of the plays and of a proportion, six volumes’ worth, of the stories. Mr Hingley has been taxed with the ‘layman’s’ question as to whether all the stories of this great writer were to be made available in English: he points out that most of the copious early fiction was written ‘for money’ and to suit the ‘numerous humorous magazines of the period’, and that the early work, from 1880, for all that it contains ‘not a few minor masterpieces’, has therefore been excluded ...”

“... was Arnold Bennett, though he would add poetry to the kinds Bennett so profitably exploited. The Oxford Library of English Poetry which he has edited, starts with Spenser and ends with Heaney; and it is not a surprising selection, though to give Cowley four times as much space as Herbert is an unusual judgment, and the only canonical upset I can find in an ...”

“... unfriendliness. It should be said straight away that the selection of poems in Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house (to use a ludicrous outdated trope); there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are lengthy it is because they are long poems. But first comes the ...”

“... some of his tutors, and he had a great career ahead of him. On graduation he won a scholarship to Oxford to begin his doctoral research on the Metaphysical poets. He was my father. His brilliant career never materialised and he died young, relatively young: by then, he had drifted half-way round the world, and when I last saw him, he seemed, in his uneven and ...”

“... by a memory of her. I heard Jennings read only once in the six years I lived in her home town of Oxford. She had studied English at St Anne’s College while Larkin and Amis were also undergraduates in the 1940s; unlike them, she had stayed on in the town. I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her ...”

“... upper-class core, from outlandish Douglas, Pandy and Salford to chairs at London, Cambridge and Oxford, takes on something of an epic air, almost at one with the path from Caliban’s cave to Prospero’s study. One advantage of being on the periphery is that you know where the centre is. ‘I was an 18-year-old working-class Catholic, as certain as a ...”

“... he returned from France to take up a university post. He spent the bulk of his academic career at Oxford, where he had graduated before the Second World War, and, like many Oxford legends, was renowned for his outrageous pranks. Stories, whether true or not, stuck to him. Finding himself on the podium behind the speaker at ...”