Accommodation in Oxford

I declare a lack of interest. This is not an insider's account. I went to 'the Other Place'. I have visited Oxford to organise conferences, stay with friends, guide groups of American students, buy books and attend a wedding and a baptism; but I have never lived there. This is not, therefore, a book for Oxford people who already know quite enough about each other. (I leave it to them to try the preceding sentence — with and without a comma.) This book aims to take the reader around Oxford, radier than claiming to penetrate it.

Tourist buses take the visitor around Oxford, so the walking tour guides make a point of emphasising that you can't see inside the colleges properly from the top of a bus; and the colleges are Oxford — of which, more anon. The walking tour can take the visitor into some quads and gardens, diough probably not the sanctum sanctorum of a Fellows' Garden. They can probably escort the visitor into a chapel and a din-ing-hall, but probably not into a library or a don's or student's room.

To the latter the outsider may have access as a member of a summer course or weekend conference; but it will be a student room with the 'character' stripped out of it  hopefully. The well-connected or merely fortuitously lucky may be invited to dine at a High Table but may retain little of the experience beyond a hazy "impression of sybaritic excess and humanistic brilliance, which will suit Oxford very well. This is, therefore, rather a book to lead the reader outward than inward, to illustrate the impact c" Oxford on the world, rather than Oxford's interest in itself, thougl j its complexity and competitiveness make it a perfect place for gossip. An 'Oxford secret' = telling only one person at a time.