When I was at All Souls College at Oxford some years ago I had a conversation during a Saturday evening dinner that has stayed in my mind ever since. Saturday dinners were poorly attended, and so we did not dine in the Great Hall, as usual, but in the smaller “dessert room.” This was my favorite room in All Souls. It had beautiful oak paneling and through its great glass windows there was a breathtaking view of the Hawksmoor Quadrangle and, looming beyond it, the Radcliffe Camera bathed in golden light. On a Saturday evening, with candlelight glinting off the eighteenth-century college silver, one felt one was in Very Oxford.