Professor Andrew Hamilton became the first vice chancellor of Oxford never to have been educated at the university when he took the job in 2009. He is English, educated at Exeter University and Cambridge, but for the previous 28 years had lived in America, the last 13 of them at Yale University, as professor of chemistry and then provost.

The university offices where he works are not so much brutalist as late 20th century ugly, spoiling the beauty of Wellington Square and its garden. The vice chancellor's own office is spacious, but utilitarian. With his oval face and bald head, he looks the epitome of the egghead, meant in an affectionate intellectual sense, not the flabby Humpty-Dumpty sort.

He refuses to play the game of which is the best university in the world: Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, are all great universities, he says, adding Tokyo and Beida, using the Chinese name for Peking University, showing that he is a universal man of letters as well as a distinguished scientist. Oxford is special. "There is not a parliament on earth that is as old as the University of Oxford; the only institution I know that has existed longer than Oxford is the Catholic Church."