Monday 16th June 2025

Culture

What the book you’re reading says about you

In an institution as prestigious as Oxford, every book you pull out in public is transformed into a portable personality test, a hard launch of your favourite academic, and...

Why romance books should be your post-exam read

With finals in full swing, and prelims just around the corner, Oxford’s libraries are...

Review: Blood Wedding – ‘A lunar eclipse on the stage’

A trembling bride. A distrustful mother. Two murderous rivals vying for a single, wavering...

Review – The Wykehamist: ‘A Saltburn for the other place’

In the underbelly of Hong Kong, a Goldsmith-Sachs Vice President invites a woman back...

Review: 1917

When Lance Corporal Blake (Dean Charles-Chapman) selects his friend of who knows how long, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), to assist him on a...

ON FILMS AND FIRST LOVES

Romance feels a certain way; but it also looks a certain way. And the certain way that romance looks is, to my mind, filmic....

Review: The Personal History of David Copperfield

With his take on The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci seems to relish the opportunity to draw out the inherent absurdism and...

Hopes for a Future Cinema: Less Lonely Women, More Little Women

Cinema, just like all other industries, follows a trend. And right now, this trend is unmistakably associated with women – with celebrities wearing “Time’s...

Preview: Hero-Man

How flawed are the moral dynamics in children’s superhero cartoons, and can we critique them through the medium of rock opera? These are the...

Preview: Pleading Stupidity

As Storm Dennis raged, I wondered if it was strictly necessary that I went to the preview of Pleading Stupidity.It was a whole six minutes’...

An Ode to Trixie Mattel

If someone were to bring up ‘drag music’, the likelihood is that your first thought would sound a little something like 2:30am on a...

Queer Theory

As we go into LGBT+ History Month, many figures throughout history - modern or not - are looked upon and celebrated, and rightly so....

Tegan & Sara’s ‘Hey, I’m Just Like You’: a Queer Coming of Age

When Tegan and Sara Quin signed with Neil Young’s Vapor Records in 1999, they were a novelty on the male-dominated indie scene. The identical...

Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

In 1881, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was published privately in 250 copies. It purports to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a...

Review: Shadows of Troy

Translating and adapting two Greek plays and then squeezing them into one production was an ambitious undertaking, but Shadows of Troy has pulled it off. The...

Queerness, Revulsion and Magic – the Dissonant Worlds of Angels in America

‘Children of the new morning, criminal minds Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan’s children’  Angels in America is a play about bodies. Kushner revels in...

Review: Bad Nick

Nicholas is a critically acclaimed author, a literary genius, and a winner of no less than fourteen Man Booker prizes…except that all of his...

TOP TEN BEST FILMS FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

Maybe you are the kind of person who avoids participating in even a card exchange when February 14th rolls around each year in a...

‘Just keep my martini cool’: Why On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) is the Epitome of Valentine’s Day Viewing

Like indigestion or crippling heartbreak, Valentine’s Day is always just around the corner. I realise this because Wish.com has started targeting my Facebook feed...

Review: ÜnkelGårf

Planning a holiday soon? Why not visit the prosperous, democratic and perpetually joyful nation of Orgislavia? They’ve hosted the Olympics for hundreds of years...

Irving Penn: His Life and Legacy

Such was his modern and innovative approach to the craft that it’s easy to forget that many of Irving Penn’s world-famous Vogue cover photographs date back...

In Defence of Fun Fashion

There are any number of qualities people tend to associate with high fashion. “Glamour” springs to mind. “Elegance”, perhaps. “Innovation”? Sure. These are virtues on which...

Shadows of Troy: Tragedies of the Trojan War reimagined

Shadows of Troy is a bold new adaptation of two giants of ancient theatre - Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. It presents the two...

Review: Taylor Swift’s ‘Miss Americana’

Taylor Swift’s last album, Reputation, was an unapologetically  aggressive response to the ‘drama’ that she had endured during nearly a decade in the...

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