But — my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is...

Do or don’t, there is no don. Don is an honor not bestowed on any procrastinator, not even a professor at Oxford.

None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the...

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

Gloria watched the swollen white orb of a hot-air balloon rising over Navy Pier and knew she had to break it off with Oliver, for he was the type who would never enjoy hot-air balloons,...

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said ‘do not walk on the grass’, one hopped. Anybody who didn’t had failed to understand what Oxford was.

OxfordIt is well that there are palaces of peaceAnd discipline and dreaming and desire,Lest we forget our heritage and ceaseThe Spirit’s work—to hunger and aspire:Lest we forget that we were born divine,Now tangled in red...

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

The truth was that I didn’t know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until...

Rome has been called the “Sacred City”: – might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the...

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it...

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory...

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the...

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”,...

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind … is the one fundamental treason which the scholar’s mind must not...