Dave Richardson’s excellent new book on Oxford pubs, which I review in Weekend today, celebrates the careers, in words and pictures, of many of the figures I have known and admired in more than four decades of propping up the city’s bars.

They include the admirable Andrew Hall, my host since 1983 at The Rose and Crown, in North Parade – sorry, North Parade Avenue, as Andrew insists it be called.

Quite a lot of insisting gets done at the Rose, by the way.

Management ukases especially apply to naughty words, which category includes the name of the rival university city (though it would never be considered such) away in the east.

Over the years, I have paid out considerable sums in fines for my infractions.

“Oxford has an abundance of character pubs,” writes Dave of the Rose, “but this could almost be in a class of its own.”

Forget the ‘almost’. The pub is indeed a nonpareil.

Where but here could one meet – as I did some months ago – a gentleman pedalling moustache wax, sporting on his upper lip the bristling evidence of its efficaciousness?

The Rose attracts as customers a number of those who run, or have run, character pubs of their own.

They include Jon Ellse, of The Perch in Binsey, to which crowds are now flocking again after his tasteful renovation completed earlier this year.

Jon is the son of the late Wally Ellse, the landlord of The Turf Tavern, off Holywell, for 40 years.

He appears in Dave’s book – a beaming figure in a black bow tie – encouraging students to drink the place dry in a 1966 rag week stunt.

The Rose is among the pubs patronised, too, by Joe Ryan, the respected former licensee of, among other places, The Half Moon, in St Clement’s Street, a real Oxford gem, then as now.

It was here back in the late 1970s that I first came across the legendary Noel Reilly, later to run Jude the Obscure in Walton Street and Far From the Madding Crowd in the city centre.

We were introduced, I would think, by the landlord John Leaves (“Leaf”) who with wife Marion also ran the Oranges and Lemons, a mecca for punks, just up the road.

Dave tells us, quite rightly, that Noel was a great patron of the arts, hosting poetry readings and plays (I well remember a rare performance of WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6) and with an artist in a studio upstairs.

He omits – possibly because it is “off the patch” – what is probably the best story about Noel.

This dates back to 1988 when he was landlord of The Beehive, in Swindon, and appointed the Czech thinker Dr Julius Tomin its “philosopher-in-residence”.

He was to give a series of lectures, at £5,000 a year.

Noel explained at the time: “I had money saved for a new car, but I decided to have a philosopher instead.”

More than 200 people packed in for the first lecture, which brought worldwide publicity.

While the pubs of Swindon can hardly be thought centres of academic distinction, those of Oxford certainly are.

Dave records the opinion of the journalist SPB Mais, expressed in an Oxford Mail article in 1957, that the The King’s Arms, in Holywell, had “more brains per square inch than any pub in the world”.

My memories of the place go back to 1973 when the back bar, the most characterful, was closed to women. Drinking sessions there would occasionally be interrupted by demonstrations by female students understandably angry at this state of affairs.

Equally likely in those days were irruptions into the bar of gangs of naked rugby players and oarsmen. ‘Streaking’ was an odd fashion of the time.

Dave’s book contains an up-to-date photograph of the KA’s office, which is now part of the pub. In the days of my early patronage, it was the private office of licensee Syd Kyffin.

He generously allowed me to use it from time to time when I needed to file urgent copy, not always easy in those pre-mobile days.

What a privilege it was to dictate, pint in hand.