My own memories at the Sheldonian, of which there are many, include the visit of the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim, to give the orchestra’s traditional May Day concert for live relay across Europe in 2010. Works included the Elgar Cello Concerto and Brahms’s Symphony No 1. I wrote in The Oxford Times: “This truly was a performance one could never forget, with the Sheldonian itself one of the stars. Wren’s lovely building was seen at its glorious best with sunlight streaming through its south windows — a study in gold that admirably reflected the warm and optimistic tone that Barenboim was encouraging from the orchestra.”

Unforgettable, too, was the visit of poet Seamus Heaney — sadly with us no more — to deliver the Chancellor’s Lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival this March.

I wrote: “Heaney is the greatest living writer of poetry in the English language and what he has to say about his work —indeed about anything — is delivered with the authority of genius. This was why crowds packed the Sheldonian Theatre to its spectacular painted ceiling.

“Heaney revealed aspects of his personality and attitudes to his craft that were utterly fascinating. Besides, he read four of his works, in a warm Irish lilt, supplying as he did so moments of exquisite beauty. “The last, Postscript, ended with a sentence at once simple and wonderful: ‘You are neither here nor there,/A hurry through which known and strange things pass/As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’”

These were the very lines chosen by Rosita Boland to conclude her report of Heaney’s funeral in The Irish Times on September 2.