Books

Review: Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt

Tanja Arnheim and Jerome Aimler are Millennials in a long-distance relationship. Tanja is a Berlin-based novelist and Jerome a Frankfurt-based web designer. They text regularly and occasionally visit one...

Writers on Writing: Reflections on the 2025 Oxford Literary Festival

The Oxford Literary Festival is one of those events I hear about every year,...

Joanna Miller’s ‘The Eights’: Unapologetically, indulgently Oxford

Do not worry: despite the title, this is not a rowing novel. Instead, the...

A Trinity trail of Oxford’s best reads and retreats

Trinity Term has come upon us faster than the lovely magnolia has blossomed, which...

Dostoyevsky and the crime of orthodoxy

Daniel Villar reflects on how Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s religious beliefs influenced his literature as the anniversary of his death approaches on 9 February

Review: The Leopard

Altair Brandon-Salmon revisits the classic Italian 20th century novel

Harry Potter and the Procrastinators’ Tome

Izzy Smith is reminded of the comforting power of the books of our childhood

Author of the week: Halldór Laxness

Ellie Duncan takes a look at one of Iceland's greatest writers

Review: ‘White Trash’ by Nancy Isenberg

Daniel Villar finds this survey of white working class America wanting

Author of the week: Paul Beatty

A look at the winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize

Writing winter from Shakespeare to Selvon

Ellie Duncan surveys the representation of winter in literature through the ages

The richness of the materiality of books

Altair Brandon-Salmon discusses the importance of books as aesthetic objects

Vacation blues: what to read when you’re missing Oxford

Laura Hackett offers a fictional fix of Oxford nostalgia to see you through the vac

Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2016

James Lamming explores the relevance of George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' in the era of Trump

Five literary festive favourites

Izzy Smith picks out five of the best books to enjoy this Christmas

Were the Nazis on drugs?

The Nazi regime was permeated with drugs, from morphine to heroin, taken by almost everyone in the Reich, from soldiers to housewives. This shocking...

Katherine Mansfield: The implosion of femininity

Priya Khaira-Hanks explores the enduring appeal of Katherine Mansfield's short stories in a modern woman's world

Iris Murdoch’s Oxford Life

Benn Sheridan reflects on Iris Murdoch's life and work in the final instalment of Through the Looking Glass

Love in a Renault Clio

Susannah Goldsbrough outlines Nancy Mitford’s tragic wit

Is it wrong for a dictionary to offend me?

Laura Wilsmore questions the OED’s newly-added definition of ‘Essex girl’

On the incompleteness of reading

Ellie Duncan gets lost in the countless possibilities of translation

Graham Greene and Oxford’s pubs

Daniel Curtis loses himself in tales of writerly pub trips in the penultimate Through the Looking Glass