Tuesday 9th September 2025

Culture

Review: Sketches from a Curious Mind

In 1962, Edward Anthony wrote: “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo”. The Oxford-based author Richard...

Night School: Oxford’s after-hours curriculum

The first time I saw Nahom and Ethan, it wasn’t on a night out...

‘Delusions and Grandeur’ at the Fringe

★★★⯪☆ If there is one word to describe Karen Hall’s Delusions and Grandeur, it is...

The Oxford Revue at the Fringe

★★★⯪☆ Returning for their 62nd annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe, the Oxford Revue rolled...

The Death of Theatre Monarchy

It’s January 2020 and a new controversy has arrived to add to the Britain’s collection. Popular discussion of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s exit from...

Review: Little Women

“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as...

Local libraries: do we still need them?

What is a library? Most of us would describe them as a place to study (or at least pretend to), or somewhere to find...

Dora Maar and the Everyday Strange

The women of the Surrealist movement have suffered a curious case of the feminine shadow, what could be termed Muse Syndrome. Often, their biographical and artistic legacies have been dogged by their associations to prominent male surrealists; the result, an awkward and myopic epitaph.

Review: ‘A Portable Paradise’

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the British-Trinidadian Roger Robinson conjectured that his poetry ‘came out of storytelling at the dinner table’. The...

BRITs come in last place for gender equality

The 40th edition of the BRIT Awards is fast approaching, and with it, concerns over the lack of female nominees in mixed-gender categories are...

Review: Don Giovanni

Premiered in 1787 in Prague and in the Habsburg court in Vienna, Mozart’s Don Giovanni offered a biting social comedy. Breathing new life into...

A Tale of Two Department Stores

It is both the best and worst of times for the complex relationship between retail, ethical/sustainable clothing production, and technology. A staggering number of...

Review: Dustin Lynch’s Tullahoma

After an initial scan through the track-list for Tennessee-born country artist Dustin Lynch’s Tullahoma, you could be forgiven for presuming this is going...

The Ghost of Sanders Past: Jil Sander A/W 2020 in Review

Since the initial departure of its peerless founder and namesake in 2000, Jil Sander has spent much of the last two decades wrangling with its sense...

Sung Sikyung: an ode to the Korean balladist

I often get asked whether I listen to K-pop. Although I answer “yes,'' I hate getting this question. In part this is because people...

Review: The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen has been described – somewhat euphemistically by critics – as a ‘guns and gangsters’ film. It has been perceived as...

Orwell: a deserving modern hero

George Orwell should be declared a modern hero. The Etonian rebel was an interesting character, for he voluntarily subjected himself to poverty for many...

Kate Tempest: the protest voice of a generation

“The whole thing’s becoming/Such a bumbling farce/Was that a pivotal historical moment/We just went stumbling past?” Not enough people have heard of Kate Tempest. These...

A Rediscovery of Michael Morpurgo

Oxford has made me used to reading huge, obscure academic texts. There is, it has to be admitted, something exciting about creeping down to...

Review: Chengyu: Chinoiserie

In Leung’s tales of adolescence, of desire and longing, loss and language, it is clear that love is the “one most/ tender, /tongueless theme”. Words “become flesh” as poems are imbued with the earnest passion of lived history.

The Pineapple Hemp Palace

Remember the 2015 Met Gala, when Rihanna wore that yellow dress, the fifty-five-pound empress’s cape which fluttered across the red carpet and left the Wintour congregation...

Has video killed the Radio Star ?

Is it time to wave radio goodbye in the 2020s? Broadcasting audio across the airwaves seems antiquated. Do we not live in a world of virtual reality and TikTok videos, our eyes continuously glued to a screen?

Jane Eyre: A Victorian Heroine For Our Time

This year is set to be a big one for the Brontës, with the bicentennial anniversary of Anne’s birth coming up later this month,...

Learning To Live – Educated by Tara Westover

‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our mind’. These lyrics from Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ course through Tara Westover’s 2018...

Follow us