This will for some time be the one-volume academic version of Oxford’s institutional history. It is well written, expertly presented, comprehensive, clear in its judgements. It builds on the eight-volume History of the University of Oxford. This multi-authored production left room for an individual view. Sir Keith Thomas, the humanist historian of early modern England, offered the task to Laurence Brockliss, an authority on the wider history of higher education, with a special interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.