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COPYRIGHT 2002 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
PHRASE, SAYING AND QUOTATION edited by Susan Ratcliffe OUP, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 696, ISBN 0198662696
The fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably compendious, with such indiosyncratic flowerings as Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the backlist of the Press fills a worthy niche for the second-hand bookshop browser.
The OUP's own bookshop on the High in Oxford is, however, rather different. The assistants are young, helpful, conceivably not overlavishly paid. The beautifully printed Oxford University Gazette may be purchased, at 75p. But there is a thinness of atmosphere, a sense that less profitable academic byways are being allowed to fall to grass and desuetude. There is little sense of the great luxury of intellectual wandering, even...
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