In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days – such as that day when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. – Evelyn Waugh (on Oxford)
Last week I had the good fortune of visiting Oxford University to attend a meeting of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration. Though I had passed through the city once as a child, I retained no memories. And so, upon returning, I manfully pushed aside any romantic images of this venerable institution that centuries of literature and hearsay inevitably inspire. After all, here in the twenty-first century it would have motor buses, shops and, surely, at least a few hideous buildings dating from the nineteen sixties. Perhaps, I thought, there would be traces lingering of the Oxford of a hundred years ago, but I was here for a meeting.
