Did I read somewhere of the death of the British pub? I believe that I did. I am not even sure that I didn't write of it, more than once. But like those about the demise of Mark Twain, these reports turn out to be premature and greatly exaggerated. Though closures are occurring all around us (I noticed the Duke of York in Oxpens had gone last week), other pubs are doing just fine. One that is better than fine - pretty bloody fantastic, I'd say - is the new look (by which I mean old look) Victoria Arms, in Walton Street, Oxford.

Under its new owner, Matthew Davies, the place has been given a splendid sprucing up. Though Matthew is best known as the proprietor, for eight years, of the ultra-modern - and ultra-trendy - Raouls cocktail bar at the other end of Walton Street, the treatment he has applied to the Victoria (the 'Arms' appears optional) is in the best traditions of the past. Period touches in this part-18th-century building include an antique mahogany bar, etched glass back fitting, a stripped wood floor and lots and lots of pictures and photographs.

In a galleried area on the first floor, there is a more clubby atmosphere, with a thick carpet and leather wing-back chairs. A large model aircraft occupies the open central space at floor level, while looking down from above - a survivor from the pub as it was - is a splendidly executed pastiche of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, with the touching fingers replaced by beer mugs. I wrongly assumed this to have been the work of artist Alan Mynall, whom I last met at the pub in 1984 when he completed a trompe l'oeil depiction of a railway viaduct in the garden. I emailed to check if this was so and found that it was not. (Amazingly, my having not thought of Alan for more than 20 years, my email was sent 15 minutes before I received one from broadcaster Nigel Rees telling me he had just been talking to Alan in connection with some researches of his own.) I called for lunch at the pub last Friday and ate a delicious chicken pie with Dijon mustard and tarragon. Such was its excellence that it came as little surprise to discover it had come from the famous M. Newitt and Sons butcher's shop in Thame. The pub also offers steak and Somerset cheddar, and butternut with onion and feta pies from the same source.

Over a glass of pinot noir, I got to know Matthew and his affable young manager, Matthew Stanford, and was able to congratulate them on running the place in such winning, unpretentious style.

The Victoria is a pub I have known and patronised over 35 years. Though it is some years since I regularly used it, I feel a nostalgic affection arising from my memories of it in the 1970s when it had a distinctly raffish air - as, indeed, did the Gardener's Arms in nearby Plantation Road and, to the ultimate degree, the Walton Ale Stores, now long gone, on the other side of Walton Street. I like the Vicky, too, for its literary associations. These arise chiefly through the patronage over many years of Dan Davin, a senior figure in the Oxford University Press, who used to like to sit with his cronies in the panelled snug (when he wasn't off the place altogether as a consequence of some slight, real or imagined). Among those he entertained there were two of the greatest boozers of the age, Dylan Thomas - who supplied his autograph to the daughter of the long-time landlord George Clack - and Julian Maclaren-Ross.

The second was a truly remarkable character, immortalised by Anthony Powell as the raffish X.Trapnel in his novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Maclaren-Ross's biographer Paul Willetts offers an engaging portrait of him in his Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia (Dewi Lewis Publishing, £14.99).

He writes: "While Dan and the others drank half-pints of beer, into which landlady Mrs Clack's false-eyelashes had a disconcerting tendency to drop as she operated the pump, Julian's preferred tipple was Moussec, a coarse brand of champagne. In deference to what he hailed its miraculous restorative properties, he started calling it 'Dr Moussadek' or simply 'the Doctor'. Since each glass of it cost half-a-crown, more than double the price of a pint of beer, he could seldom stretch to buying a round when it was his turn. To avoid these recurrent moments of mortification, Dan - far from wealthy himself - would sometimes offer to lend him a pound or two.

'Because his wounded pride made him irritable, any such donations had to be tendered with the utmost diplomacy, Dan discovered that the best tactic was to distract him by coaxing him into one of his customary monologues about the perfidy of publishers, life in the army, crime novels, or cherished movies, an esoteric passion for Japanese cinema providing a perennial topic. If Dan's diversionary tactic failed, Julian would lapse into a sulk, his dark inexpressive eyes hidden behind the new reflective aviator-style sunglasses he'd acquired."

I do not find it difficult to think of this improbable figure leaning over the Vicky's bar today, his foot on the brass rail beneath. But can you still buy Moussec?