Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don’t think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.
The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter’s original allegory of truth and light striking the university is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds.
People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the ‘Oxford bubble’ because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.
On my mother’s side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father’s, from tenant farmers near Oxford.
My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don’t have children who are overweight.
I’d always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I’d think: ‘Where is the justice?’ I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.
I want to prove that you don’t have to come from Oxford University or Rada – and you don’t have to have parents that support you – to succeed.
The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.
I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I’d be a massive movie star. But there’s a longevity to what I do. It’s more reliable. Someone isn’t deciding that I’m the next big thing.
I have a B.S. in Biology from MIT, an M.Sc. in Human Biology and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. I never intended for so many degrees, but I enjoyed getting them all.
I’d fought in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, having left Oxford to do so.
If I find a dress I really like and it happens to be a bit short, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. The thing about going to Oxford is it does give you the confidence to be how you want to be.
Wikipedia’s a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester’s account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in ‘The Professor and the Madman,’ which outlines James Murray’s mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.
In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
It is a strange world, Oxford – quite claustrophobic. I was often glad I was only there for eight weeks at a time.
A guy playing pool in a pub once said to me that they should put me on the telly. It went in one ear and out the other. But then I started thinking about it. I wondered how it all worked, did you have to be best mates with someone at the BBC who you went to uni with in Oxford?
When I left Oxford, I knew I wanted to act, but I was unsure how to go about it.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
My education started with Latin taught at home by a governess, I can’t imagine why, and for some reason I attended the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls before moving to the Dragon School at the dangerous age of 8 or so.
How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
In 1960, I went to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.
Governance has been at the heart of the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and is a clear focus in its report, ‘Now for the Long Term.’
I decided to finish at Oxford because I looked up at the top of the buildings – the gargoyles and spires – and decided to stay.
I don’t think I’m going to become Brad Pitt overnight, but I presume if walk down Oxford Street, there is a chance someone might clock me.
I was a graduate student at Oxford when I discovered Georgiana.
As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
I’ve been around – having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that – some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they’re just as nutty as the rest of us – sometimes worse.
Salamanca is known as La Ciudad Dorada, the Golden City, because it is built from Villamayor sandstone and when the sun reflects on it the city has a warm amber tint. The university, founded in 1218, is the fifth-oldest in Europe and one of the most renowned, judged on a par with Oxford.
There’s something awful about Oxford, I think. It’s such a little ghetto.
While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.
I wish I’d gone to university. I had the opportunity to go to Oxford but by then I’d already started as a comedian.
I did gigs alongside Oxford students and I thought being working class I’d feel inferior. But the thing is you don’t feel inferior if you’re getting more laughs than the other bloke on the bill.
Our daughter’s name Arwynn comes from Arwen in ‘Lord of the Rings’ because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.
When I finished my degree at Oxford, I went and acted for a bit. And I was appalling. And with each part, I thought, ‘Well, that’s embarrassing. I’d better do one more to show people I’m not that bad.’ And, in fact, instead of a taking a year, that’s gone on for 35 years.
I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.
I’m extraordinarily lucky to have so many friends across such a diverse group of people. One day I’ll be at Oxford, the next at some complete idiot’s lunch.
I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog.
Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?
It’s lovely going to Oxford, it’s very difficult to film there as you’re doing a period drama in a city which is very crowded.
Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’ has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.
Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.
I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939.
Having spent years in academia – at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Oxford University and Harvard Law School – I encountered a wide range of worldviews.
I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn’t want to do it anymore.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature – even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.
Nurses told my mother that I was going to be OK. They thought I could walk without a limp and without a brace. And we stopped in a shoe store on the way home and bought a pair of low-top saddle Oxford shoes, which was sort of a symbol that I was going to be a normal little boy.
Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities – in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they’re actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.
The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land’s End Rally.
