Terry Deary: Gruesome Guides: Oxford (Horrible Histories)

Educational graphic history for young (and old) on the violence of this whitewashed city.

David Horan: Oxford

Splendour, privilege, class disparity and violence in the colleges, streets and locales of Oxford.

One of the least appealing sights in modern Oxford is the little knots of alcoholics sitting on the few benches of the city streets, drinking their cans of strong lager or swigging from bottles of cheap wine. These have recently been joined by the pathetic spectacle of New-Age beggars, sitting on the pavements, often with a dog on a piece of string or sometimes a filthy child to add to the pathos.

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

Toffs face love and loss between the wars.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.


I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.


He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

Max Beerbohm: Zuleika Dobson

Death cancels all engagements.

“She did not look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. ... Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and behind her ears, as an orphan's should be. Parted somewhere at the side, it fell in an avalanche of curls upon one eyebrow. From her right ear drooped heavily a black pearl, from her left a pink; and their difference gave an odd, bewildering witchery to the little face between.

The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him—some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes—possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.

Jan Morris: Oxford

Few cities have been much more loved, loathed, and celebrated than Oxford.

Sometimes as I walk through Oxford, cursing at her traffic, marvelling at her obscurity, and wondering when on earth they are going to bring her up to date, this old magic momentarily dazes me, and I lean against some gold-grey stone beneath the ragwort, and think how lucky I am to be grumbling there at all.