Oxford
Gaudy notebook
As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything…
Poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
Isis
‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph. For once he was right. It was…
Oxford blues
It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a…
Up close and personal
In recycling his most intimate encounters as fiction – including amazing feats of promiscuity in small-town New England – John Updike drew unashamedly on his own experiences for inspiration, says Philip Hensher
Astel
Dear old Ian Hislop was pottering around North Petherton, Somerset, on television, to talk about the Alfred Jewel, found nearby…
Between the broad and the high
Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…
Small wars in academe
It’s a misleading title, because there is nothing unexpected about Professor Carey, in any sense. He doesn’t turn up to…
Not dynamite, more blancmange
Debunking reputations is now out of fashion, says Philip Hensher, and Craig Raine should give it up — especially as he always misses the point
A choice of crime fiction
Pity the poor novelist whom commercial pressures trap within a series, doomed with each volume to diminish the stock of…
Have I gone to the wrong party?
I’m still weighing up whether to run for Parliament, but after this week’s reshuffle I’ve concluded I’m in the wrong…
Shady groves of academe
The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is…
Here comes everybody
This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so,…
Are you sitting comfortably…
Robert Gore-Langton on Oxford’s new Story Museum, which aims to put stories into young lives deprived of books
We were dazzled
This is the third volume of Isaiah Berlin letters; one more to go. Discerning critics have showered the first two…
