Books
Review: ‘The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Middle East 1979-2003’ by Steve Coll
Tyrants should only be brought down by their own people; they become martyrs when brought down by foreigners.
Bust?: Saving the Economy, Democracy and our Sanity by Robert Peston and Kishan Koria- Review
"So long as we have an economic system geared towards the accumulation of wealth rather than the acquisition of it, inequalities will continue to widen"
Book recommendations from the editors’ desk
"It’s rare that I find non-fiction to be such a page-turner, but Tara Westover’s autobiography was just that."
Greg Heffley: A Hero of Our Time
Few modern comic heroes align with our distinctive age – an age which Dickens’s...
The man of the moment: Review of Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
"Baldwin does his best to humanise Starmer and to deflate the view of him as “Mr Boring”."
Travels with a Cross-Dressing friend: A Personal Biography of China
Michael Bristow, a former BBC Foreign Correspondent, hopes his book will challenge the Chinese government
‘Reversed’: An interview with Lois Letchford
Kurien Parel interviews author Lois Letchford about her memoir 'Reversed' which follows the journey of her learning disabled son, Nicholas, from the bottom of the class to Oxford PHD student.
Childhood’s Clarity in ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’
The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens with an epigraph from Maurice Sendak, “I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.”
Reversed: A Memoir
'One of the striking points the memoir illustrates is the level of abuse children with learning disabilities face, from teachers and others' says Kurien Parel
Patriotism and Chilean Poetry
Bridget McNulty discusses Hugh Ortega's debut collection and Chilean identity
I was overcome with a sense of familiarity, intermingled with strangeness
Beth James reflects on the forgotten female modernist poet, Hope Mirrlees
Daemon Voices Lecture Review – Two generations share the same world view
Pullman and Rundell make for an oddly cohesive pair at their talk in Blackwells.
García Marquez makes magical realism realistic
Barney Pite unpacks the "tragic, brutal and cruel" world of Márquez's News of a Kidnapping
Remembering Wallace: Biography and Memory
'The End of the Tour' is a powerful biopic, but by all accounts it gets David Foster Wallace wrong. Does that matter?
Self-publishing can counter literary elitism
Self-publishing is not a new phenomenon in the literary world; authors ranging from Marcel Proust to Beatrix Potter self-published books that are now integral...
Iraq is not a twentieth century Crusade
Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman delivers a polemic speech against rhetorical comparisons between the war on terror and the crusades
Salman Rushdie and Trump: Migration, modernity, and transformation
William Arlid Crona writes about Rushdie's latest
A feminist rereading of Austen for 2018
The 18th century novel is surprisingly relevant to the issues facing women today
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: reflections on Kazuo Ishiguro’s recognition
Did the Swedish Academy miss the subtlety of his writing?
