“Lyra’s Oxford has the same street-plan as ours,” says Steve Fisher, of Oxford Official Walking Tours. “So the influence of the urban landscape is obvious. But the university’s intellectual and academic history also spurred Pullman’s imagination.”
The quad of the Bodleian Old Library embodies 17th-century education, with doorways to the three schools of philosophy (metaphysics, moral, natural) and seven liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, logic, grammar and rhetoric).
