Nobody walks into these places casually. The stone is older than anything else you will touch that day, and a door is unlocked at the hour it has always been unlocked. Sixty-three watercolor-inspired illustrations keep to a single day across Oxford and Cambridge, from fog on the river to one lit room high up and two people walking home beneath it.

But the stone was never the point. The point was the hours: the reading rooms, the tutorial reduced to two armchairs, oars put back wet, a pint under lamplight when the weather clears. The palette runs on honey limestone and cool violet shadow, with one recurring note of crimson in a scarf or a book cloth.