Victoria Ashford

I hold a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where I was a Junior Research Fellow for three years. I have published two books on Victorian literature and culture, and I write regularly for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. For fifteen years, I have been one of London's most sought-after humanities tutors.

My students come to me because they want more than exam preparation — they want intellectual transformation. Whether it is a seventeen-year-old applying to Oxford, a university student struggling with their dissertation, or a City professional who wants to read more seriously, I offer the kind of deep, sustained engagement with ideas that is increasingly rare in our distracted age.

I teach literature, history, and philosophy as interconnected disciplines, because that is how the greatest minds have always understood them. A student who can move fluently between Austen and Arendt, between the French Revolution and the Romantic imagination, between economic theory and moral philosophy — that is a student who will thrive in any intellectual environment.

My approach is rigorous but never dry. Ideas should excite you. If they do not, either the ideas are bad or the teaching is. Mine is neither.