This is a gem of a book written by a celebrated poet and novelist, not to mention Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford, Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College. Patrick McGuinness wanders around the city making sage insights engraved with the proximity and observance of living here for three decades, long enough for very many businesses to come and go, very many sacred sites to be destroyed in the name of ‘Progress’, and many others to remain standing when maybe they ought not. It’s also wonderfully funny, but much better than cheap shots. Starting off at the railway station and describing it as looking like ‘the shell of a bankrupt garden centre’ is simply accurate reporting, while a few pages down the line we find a quotation from one Thomas Sharp to the effect that ‘Oxford stations have come to be spoken of with the kind of joke that people make to keep them from the black despair of hope continually deferred.’ And that was said in 1948, but in 2021 it is also merely accurate reporting for anyone who has been keeping an eye on the station for the past decade. Apart from all this – and there is no room here to do justice to the book so do get a copy – ‘real’ turns out to be scratchy and claw-bared, with the past speaking angrily and the mystical, mythical Oxfords of which there are so many are shunned and sidelined while all the other bits – bits you never went to as a student like Blackbird Leys – get celebrated and studied. This is great stuff and much better than a mere guidebook, but it is also that and you could walk around with it in hand, quietly chuckling as the outrages pile up and the industrial past gathers its iron wits, to choke the ivory towers and spit at the dons. The section on why Boswells closed is controversial because I’m not sure it’s right, but the book is so post-pandemic that at least all these topics are present and accounted for, summer of 2021.