Oxford in Quotations

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. “To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. “ Which eighteenth-century author wrote these words in his autobiography? Oliver Goldsmith Samuel Johnson Edward Gibbon David Hume

2. Which poet wrote the following in a poem entitled “Oxford, May 30, 1820”? “Yet, O ye spires of Oxford! domes and towers! Gardens and groves! your presence overpowers The soberness of reason ….” Keats Coleridge Shelley Wordsworth

3. A celebrated poet and literary critic said of Oxford: “Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal….? Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!...” Who wrote these words? Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Hazlitt Matthew Arnold Mark Pattison

4. “We spent two very pleasant days at Oxford. There are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford. Montmorency had eleven fights on the first day, and fourteen on the second, and evidently thought he had got to Heaven.” From which nineteenth-century humorous work is this quotation taken? “Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities,” by R. S. Surtees “The Diary of a Nobody,” by George and Weedon Grossmith “Three Men in a Boat,” by Jerome K. Jerome “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll

5. According to Oscar Wilde, “One cannot live at Oxford because of the _____. In all else it is a most pleasant city.” What word is missing? traffic dons undergraduates food

6. A caricaturist and satirist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrote: “Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the fact that they are no longer at school ... The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.” Who was he? George Cruikshank Max Beerbohm William Makepeace Thackeray Edward Lear

7. “The clever men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent Mr Toad.” Who wrote these lines? Kenneth Grahame Enid Blyton Beatrix Potter Lewis Carroll

8. Who is popularly supposed to have ordered an undergraduate to leave Oxford by the town drain? Charles Dodgson Benjamin Jowett William Spooner Mark Pattison

9. “When you hear it languishing And hooing and cooing and sidling through the front teeth, The oxford voice – Or worse still The would-be oxford voice – You don’t even laugh any more; you can’t. For every blooming bird is an oxford cuckoo nowadays. You can’t sit on a bus or in the tube But it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of your neck.” Which author’s lines are these? W. H. Auden D. H. Lawrence Louis MacNeice George Orwell

10. “Pink may, double may, dead laburnum Shedding an Anglo-Jackson shade, Shall we ever, my staunch Myfanwy, Bicycle down to North Parade? Kant on the handle-bars, Marx in the saddlebag, Light my touch on your shoulder-blade.” Which twentieth-century Poet Laureate produced these lines? Cecil Day-Lewis John Masefield Robert Bridges John Betjeman