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“... élite has been less remarked upon. In the Sixties Labour’s Front Bench was dominated by Oxford graduates – often by Oxford dons. Over the last two decades that élite has been progressively squeezed out, so that in 1987, for the first time in over half a century, Labour went into the election with a leader and ...”

“... protests at the University of Cape Town brought down a bronze statue of Rhodes on the campus. The Oxford chapter of Rhodes Must Fall took aim at a statue of Rhodes that stands on the façade of Oriel College, of which Rhodes was an alumnus and benefactor. Critics have been quick to register their disapproval. Some historians have compared RMF to Islamic ...”

“... to me 11 years ago when I studied for the Mods exam in the first year of the English degree in Oxford, and found I had to read ‘The Seafarer’ and Ulysses in the same week. The Oxford syllabus must be unique in this combination, 1 thought. What other course could offer the same variety? Yet it is just this statutory ...”

“... contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since the ...”

“... eventually prompted the staid, donnish, Anglocentric, and it must be said pretty darn dull, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to appear in 1941.Throughout this period the concept of the ‘quotation’ remained a moving target. Was it a remark that was quoted, and which had become part of a common store of ‘familiar’ knowledge? Was it a phrase that ...”

“... When Oxford decided to do Shakespeare they clearly made up their minds that the scale of the operation must be very grand, and a team of scholars has been working hard for eight years to get it done quickly, done right, and done with the greatest possible display and novelty. One has to admire not only the industry of Professor Wells and his associates, but their flair for publicity, as evidenced by the enormous solemn fuss about the poem ‘Shall I die?’, now accorded an honoured place in their canon, and also by the proclaimed scope and originality of their enterprise, which, though not essentially different from other such enterprises, is different in many eye-catching ways, and must have set the Press some unique problems ...”

“... had met (I cannot say ‘I knew’) Janet Hobhouse in her youth, when I was a graduate student at Oxford and she was an undergraduate. I feel embarrassed about surviving such a vital person who was substantially younger than myself. Perhaps the most surprising thing about death, that great commonplace, is that it never ceases to surprise. The sure touch of ...”

“... to Eton, where he suffered less and got over it. The next move, to Christ Church, was painless. Oxford gave him Gilbert Ryle as his tutor and appointed him to a lectureship before he graduated. Having volunteered for war service he was drawn, by the irresistible voice of privilege, into a Guards regiment. Thereafter his military career passed through ...”

“... in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So to Oxford. It was 1917. Lewis had volunteered, and he was in effect an officer cadet, soon in ‘barracks’ at Keble. He returned to Oxford after a brief spell on the Western front, where he was wounded, and at ...”

“... is concerned, such issues are especially vexing. As Stanley Wells, the General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, engagingly remarks in the title essay of Modernising Shakespeare’s Spelling,* they drive an editor to ‘a state of impotent neurosis, or drink, or an early grave’. To take one example from Troilus (and I must not write Troylus, since ...”

“... There’s a fascinating anthropological study to be written about Oxford undergraduates of the 1960s – or perhaps this book is it. Roger Garfitt in his daffodil-yellow pinstripe suit and silver-topped cane – mingling with the other ‘heads’, boiling up asthma drugs for a hit, talking of samsara and Kropotkin – seems a type as exotic as an Elizabethan dandy: We would split an amp of methedrine between us, sliding the needle just under the skin in a procedure known as skinpopping … sometimes it seemed to me that the drugs were almost irrelevant and what mattered was the expeditionary instinct that had Bryn and me angling our shoulders into the existential wind or Paul and me reconstituting ourselves around the thin spills of Old Holborn we smoked in liquorice papers, the sweetness offsetting the dark tobacco and the two together anchoring us after the night of non-being ...”

“... Lexicon, compiled by ‘noted linguist’ Michael Adams and published by – keep your hair on – Oxford University Press (£12.99). For the fast asleep among you: Buffy is not a video game, but an American TV show (not that there’s much difference) whose producers had the good sense, seven years ago, to wonder what would happen if you got a bunch of ...”

“... The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before’. In the long summer months when he was confined to his Somerset parish at Combe ...”

“... Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The rule in normal times had been that no ...”

“... 8th Collegiate, the Longman Modern English Dictionary, the revised Chambers, the 6th Concise Oxford, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Oxford Paperback) are still basically concerned with translating a relatively foreign language into a relatively familiar one. And – despite the claims of radical ...”