The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.
When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children. Or else I'll start studying anthropology - it's a science that's always interested me very much, also in relation to the problem of poverty. Or else I'll go back to studying history - at Oxford I took my degree in history. Or else. . . I don't know, I'm fascinated by the tribal communities. I might busy myself with them.
Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album. . . Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days. . . As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read.
Upon the present occasion London was full of clergymen. The specially clerical clubs, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Old University, and the Athenaeum, were black with them.
I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939.
From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
. . . The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
We've been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone's completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that's too high. It's not a very complicated idea.
Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.
Theres nothing to fear but fears themselves, such as monsters, rejection, food poisoning, redundancy, monsters, and oxford commas.
A lot of girls annoy me who go to university - one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I've got to pay for that being an income tax payer.
I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.
The silver Thames takes some part of this county in its journey to Oxford.
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.