From their royal patronage as early as the Eleventh Century to their current position atop international league tables, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have been synonymous with academic excellence for over nine hundred years.

Within this position as the leading academic institutions worldwide, the rich and impressive literary history of the two Universities has thrived, and they have produced a great proportion of the most respected and influential writers of the English Canon.

Both Oxford and Cambridge Universities initially emerged as a result of upheaval elsewhere; Oxford in 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris and they flocked there to study closer to home, and Cambridge in 1209, when scholars taking refuge from hostile townsmen in Oxford migrated there and set up a new academic organization. However it was not long before both Universities began to flourish, producing many of the greatest and most famous writers ever to have lived.

A rich and famous alumni.

From Cambridge's roll call of Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Plath and Hughes, several poet laureates have emerged, alongside some of the most highly valued and respected novelists in the world. Cambridge academics have also taken their place amongst the most influential critics of English literature, with professors like F. R. Leavis shaping the way our language is read and approached by students and academics alike.

Meanwhile, Oxford University boasts amongst its graduates such literary giants as J. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Martin Amis and Philip Larkin, some of the most widely acclaimed and deeply revered writers ever to set pen to paper. From Milton's Paradise Lost, to Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and Tennyson's In Memoriam, the work produced by these writers continues to be celebrated as both foundation and pinnacle of the finest English literature ever produced.

Indeed this tradition of Oxbridge literary excellence and international acclaim seems only set to continue, with the emergence of such recent graduates as Cambridge's Zadie Smith, with her award winning novel White Teeth being declared harbingers of a new generation of literary excellence.

From poets to novelists, playwrights to critics, the graduates of these Universities between them have played an immeasurably influential role in the shaping of English Literature as we know it today.

However it is not only the literature produced by Oxbridge graduates, but the knowledge, excellence and prominence in their fields of the fellows and professors at these Universities that ensures their place as the institutional world leaders in both the study and advancement of literature.

As Oxford and Cambridge have long held the greatest international reputations for outstanding academic achievement, it is unsurprising that their teaching positions and research fellowships attract intellectuals of the highest possible standard from around the world.

Today's students

Today's students at both Universities therefore not only benefit from the best teaching in the world from the most respected academics alive, but they also learn to produce work of their own whose excellence and standards of research and accuracy lives up to the extremely high standards expected by those who teach them.

To be a student of such masters is to be inspired and spurred on to achieve the pinnacle of one's own academic potential; to aspire to the lofty literary heights of the professors who teach and inspire in equal measure.

It is this combination of inspirational, exceptional tutors with the highest possible academic standards and expectations, which ideally places Oxbridge students, past and present to be the most academically rigorous, thorough and accurate literary editors available anywhere in the world.

They are simultaneously submerged in a culture of groundbreaking literary achievement and exploration and trained to hone and perfect their own writing to echo the standards and achievements of those who guide and teach them.

Immense Resources and access to information.

Of course being a centre of such academic excellence carries the immense advantage of placing the students of Oxbridge Universities at the very heart of some of the richest resources and foremost centres for literary record and research anywhere in the modern world.

With over eight million volumes, the Bodleian Library in Oxford is the second largest in the United Kingdom, second only to the British Library, whilst the famous Cambridge University Library is close behind. Both are legal deposit libraries, meaning that every book published in the UK is available there, no matter how rare, and with the collections growing at a rate of over three miles of shelving per year, the students of these Universities are uniquely placed in quite literally having every existing literary text in the English language at their fingertips, accessible twenty-four hours a day.

Typical workload of an Oxbridge student.

The typical weekly workload of an Oxbridge student far exceeds that of students at most other universities, with more extracurricular reading, essays, supervisions and lectures within a fortnight than students elsewhere may undertake in an entire term.

The ability to work under this amount of pressure, to produce essays of consistent academic excellence whilst maintaining such a demanding and intellectually challenging schedule, means that each of our editors has learned the essential skills of efficiency, time management, accuracy and dedication to the task at hand to a quite extraordinarily high degree.

The job of an editor demands pinpoint accuracy, attention to detail to the most minute degree, the greatest patience and a tendency towards perfectionism; all traits more frequently displayed by Oxbridge students than by the members and graduates of any other University. In addition, their longer reading lists and higher output of written work must inevitably lead to a greater degree of the specific grammatical and linguistic knowledge essential to an editor's work than that possessed by students of any other typical University.

We draw our pool of editors from Oxbridge students and graduates alone because we believe that the unparalleled literary history of excellence of their Universities, the inspirational, world-class teaching they receive and the exceptionally high standards of work they have come to expect of themselves, result in the best editors it is possible to find.Why settle for anything less?