Monday 4th May 2026
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Escaping to Space

Isabella Welch
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Escaping to Space

David Bowie asked if there was Life on Mars? not because of an interest in aliens or the unknown, but because of a dissatisfaction with life on earth. The entire song depicts a girl who has seen the worst of life ‘ten times or more’, who considers this planet a ‘sunken dream’ in contrast to what awakened existence could be, who sees a film that is a montage of injustice and through this all holds the single overbearing thought ‘is there life on Mars?’ A desire for a world out in the heavens, another place we might visit in the stars, is not necessarily indicative of a whimsical wish for adventure, but conversely a taunt of a utopia that could physically exist.

It is entirely within the realm of possibility that there is another world out there where all that socially isolates us on Earth could be valued in a different society. If there exist not billions but trillions upon quadrillions of life forms, isn’t it far more likely we might find someone perfect to love us than if we are merely trapped on Earth? It was Star Trek that gave birth to fanfiction as a genre, a series that presents in part the fantasy of space as a series of brief romances between Captain Kirk and endless fascinating and unique alien women. The universe is a world of possibility, and that can be possibility for the grandest cause of furthering understanding of science and the human condition, to possibility for filling the deep insecurities of our own hearts.

Unpopular opinion though it may be, Doctor Who series 5, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor has always resonated the most with out of the whole show. In the opening episode the Doctor first meets companion Amy as a lonely child and promises to take her on a trip through space if she would just wait five minutes for him to come back. He accidentally takes twelve years to return, but Amy has had a suitcase packed for outer space and has been waiting the entire time, ready to abandon her life in a heartbeat for the promises of another life travelling the stars. Science fiction is filled with souls who would leave earth behind at a moment’s notice, and I know I would.

This isn’t a phenomenon that has only existed since the birth of popular sci-fi ushered in by Star Trek – Lord Byron expressed in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that the stars were one of the few sources of hope left for someone who felt nothing but a death of feeling in every country he visited. He asks the stars, the ‘poetry of heaven’, to forgive him for when ‘our destinies o’erleap their mortal state and claim a kindred’ with them. The misanthropic narrator of the poem isn’t completely devoid of a feeling of purpose – it is only unfortunate that this purpose lies beyond someone confined to Earth could ever reach. W. H. Auden gives Byron what he couldn’t achieve in life in Letter to Lord Byron by placing Byron in a cosmic ‘abode’ in the stars where he perpetually watches over other poets and intercedes when poetry needs saving, and defines Byron’s constant influencing of new artists as proof he is up in the heavens, reading others’ poems like fan-mail. Auden doesn’t allow poets to die – upon the death of W. B. Yeats, Auden wrote in his Ode to Yeats ‘he became his admirers.’ Instead, they are somewhere out there in the galaxy, watching out for the other poets below on Earth.

Now that the Tesla car has been launched into the Earth’s orbit, pieces of media have been chosen seemingly by Elon Musk himself to represent humanity to the rest of this universe. Elon Musk was not the best choice as Earth’s ambassador, but for better or worse there is now a car perpetually playing Bowie’s other extraterrestrial song Space Oddity. As a representation for humanity we could certainly do a lot worse. Taken without Ashes to Ashes this is a song about an astronaut slowly coming to terms with his own death in space, but it is upbeat through the helplessness. Major Tom is guided by his spaceship which ‘knows which way to go’, while ‘planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do’, and so there is a sense of total loss of direction and agency – but there are simultaneously images of Major Tom saying his final goodbyes to his wife (‘Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows’), the people revering him, and him being in a position where he will surely go down in history as one of an unhappy few to die in space.

It is a gradual song about drifting peacefully away to a sublime death that will never be forgotten. It is the calm fading away of someone who departed this planet in search of the beautiful, and thus is an anthem of the driven nature of humanity, and hardly the worst ambassador to the galaxy. Since the advent of astrology space has been believed to hold some of the secrets to the universal issues humans puzzle over, and for every laser battle, there are vast times of contemplation and reflection in Science Fiction. From thousands of years of cryogenic freezing, to the chilling 10-minute ‘Star Gate’ sequence of Kubrick’s 2001 as Dave struggles and fails to comprehend the universe with his human brain, space is more empty and incomprehensible than it is anything else.

The concept that when we look to space we are trying to escape the flaws of this earth doesn’t merely exist within media, but of course has found a place in ‘political theory’. A group of Trotskyist conspiracy theorists in the 60’s attempted to fuse communism and ufology, and came up with Posadism (named after their leader Juan Posadas). Opening branches in dozens of countries, the Fourth International Posadist ideology essentially boiled down to the belief that an alien race with the technology to travel through space to visit Earth would inevitably have come from a more socially advanced world where communism was embraced and class struggle ended. Thus, to install communism across the world, one should not seek to change world politics or even incite revolution, but seek the means to discover aliens willing to invade us, colonise us, and make us communists. For those wishing to see posadism mocked or rebel against the Terrestrials, I would recommend the Facebook page Intergalactic Workers’ League.

Conventionally, when we think of space in the media, we might think of disaster movies about alien invasion, and most people would likely not welcome a first contact happening in their lifetime. This is hardly recent – the first work of science fiction could be said to be Lucian’s A True Story written in Greek in the second century A. D., where the armies of the Sun seek to cloud out the Moon. But behind that there is a sense of the wondrous impossible as Lucian’s characters eat the cheese of the moon, drink from its milky lakes and ride its resident emus. The greatest reason we have to fear a First Contact war is because of humanity’s track record with civilisations encountering one another for the first time. The violence we ascribe imagined space cultures with is our own, whereas the wonder we seek in space comes from a lack of stimulation from our own world. However, I would suggest that the latter is a crueller thought – it is easy to sleep at night being grateful that violent aliens haven’t come to our planet, less so to think there are trillions of dazzling sights and individuals out there in this universe we will forever miss out on seeing.

John Major apologised to Bill Clinton over Home Office role in Oxford draft-dodging rumours, papers reveal

Jem Bartholomew
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John Major apologised to Bill Clinton over Home Office role in Oxford draft-dodging rumours, papers reveal

John Major sent a letter apologising to Bill Clinton over the Home Office’s involvement in damaging press rumours, official cabinet records reveal.

During the 1992 US Presidential Election campaign, rumours circulated that Clinton had applied for UK citizenship while studying at Oxford to avoid the Vietnam draft.

Despite a Home Office investigation proving the claims groundless, the press coverage –reported in The Washington Post on December 5, 1992 – proved deeply embarrassing for Major.

“I am disturbed by reports which have appeared about enquiries by our Home Office relating back to your time at Oxford,” Major wrote to Clinton on December 6, 1992.

“I am only sorry that it has been played up now in a mischievous way. I hope the mischief will be short lived.”

The incident further strained relations between the Prime Minister and President-elect Clinton, after two Conservative Party strategists had travelled to the US weeks before the election to advise Republican candidate George H.W. Bush.

Clinton’s time at Oxford between 1968 and 1970 was targeted by Bush campaigners seeking damaging information. Charles Black, a senior Republican campaign advisor, confirmed they’d hired an ‘oppositional research’ specialist to dig for information in Britain.

Rumours of Clinton’s ‘draft-dodging’ were used by opponents to question his legitimacy during the election. The US State Department conducted a search into Clinton’s passport files but found no evidence for the claims.

Major clarified, “What happened, as I hope [British Ambassador to the US] Robin Renwick will have explained to your people, is that during the campaign our Home Office were asked a number of questions by journalists about whether you had applied for British citizenship while in this country.”

“In accordance with their normal practice, they refused to make any on-the-record comment but, having checked the facts, they sought to guide the press on a background basis that there was absolutely nothing in the story.” The Washington Post mistakenly published the Home Office quote on-the-record, embarrassing Major.

Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, criticised the Home Office’s investigation. It’s “not just an error of judgement,” he said. “It can’t exactly help our relations with one of our most powerful allies.”

The files – released at the National Archives at Kew on December 28, 2018 – showed no personal response from Clinton. A potential December 1992 meeting was also rearranged for 1993 in a move the Washington Post called a “political snub.”

Their next correspondence was another letter from Major on January 19, 1993, the day before Clinton’s inauguration. “Norma and I send you and Hillary our best wishes for your great day tomorrow and for your success and happiness at the White House,” Major wrote.

In response, Clinton telephoned Major at 6.30pm the same day and they ‘spoke for about 15 minutes.’ Major said ‘he hoped the President would come over to Britain again.’

Clinton responded, ‘he and the Prime Minister would need to meet soon but, apart from that, he would like to make a sentimental journey to England, including Oxford, at some point during his term.’ They went on to discuss policy regarding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Annelise Dodds tells Cherwell second referendum could be the “only way out” in exclusive interview

Angus Brown
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Annelise Dodds tells Cherwell second referendum could be the “only way out” in exclusive interview

If the pressure of the last two years in British politics have affected Annelise Dodds, then she doesn’t show it. She is cheery and friendly as we discuss her views on the Brexit process, its impact on the city, the university, and its students, but Dodds is nevertheless angry about the way that the government is conducting itself.

The MP for Oxford East – elected in 2017 after three years as an MEP – seems to be overflowing with criticisms of the government, and solutions which she hopes her own party might implement in office. When I ask her if she thinks that the country needs a new general election so that a new government could carry out Brexit she is adamant that it does, but that it needs a new government for so many other reasons as well.

“I think that’s why the party’s calling for it as well.” She says, “In terms of Labour’s position on how we can deal with the situation, I’m obviously concerned with where we are now as a country. I’m very worried about the deal that’s being proposed by Theresa May – it would be very bad for us, particularly in Oxford where we need to have certainty about customs arrangements into the future. We don’t have that under her deal, and that’s a big issue for big employers like BMW who have big questions about freedom of migration. We need to have a different approach. Now if we had an election and had a Labour government we’d be in a very different position…”

I ask her if, like her party, she is drifting towards the conclusion that the only alternative to a new general election is a second referendum, and here she seems more hesitant.

“We’d have to work out what Labour’s position would be in a general election, I think we would have a very different approach to negotiating, but it might also be important to see whether people’s views have changed. But if we can’t get that general election and we don’t have a large number of conservative MPs willing to hold one unfortunately”, she pauses and then says, “the only way out of that impasse could be to have another referendum.”

“But I don’t think it would be easy, quite the opposite – it would be very, very difficult. As somebody who campaigned to Remain across a lot of the South East of England, including a lot of areas which voted Leave, I think it would be very, very difficult, but I think it could be the only way to resolve this issue.”

“If it is then it’s much more likely to be accepted by people who voted leave, as well as some people who voted Remain but who are now saying, ok you just need to get on with it.” She’s also angry about how the government has handled Brexit, and says that “we have a government that is fixated on these red lines it set at the beginning of negotiations, and if they chucked those we would be a in a much better position, because they would be looking at it from a point of view of what is best for the country, and not from the point of view of quite a right-wing ideological position.”

Stridently opposed to what she sees as the negative repercussions of Brexit for British students, she seems genuinely concerned about the negative effect leaving the European Union might have on their future prospects.

“I’ve heard many stories about people having job offers withdrawn in the rest of the EU and also of people previously saying they’d take up jobs in Britain and then deciding that they didn’t want to. That’s for a whole range of different reasons. I think partly it’s about lack of clarity around research funding and round future migration rules, which are still very, very unclear.But I think it’s also because people are worried about what kind of reception they’ll get in our country.”

In particular Dodds opposes the government’s current immigration targets, remarking melancholically that “The government has wrongly suggested that you can indicate skills purely on the basis of what salary level is and that there might be a similar cut-off for people coming into our country to work as there is for non-EU migrants.”

As a former academic she seems concerned about how younger researchers might be unable to work in the UK, disrupting the academic research process.

Nevertheless, she also seems hopeful, saying “I think we’re moving towards a more sensible position on this, and I think the Home Secretary is more enlightened on some of it than the Prime Minister, but we’ve not got yet to where we need to be.”

“In terms of more generally, young people and their rights within the whole process, certainly as students, I’ve raised a number of times, including directly with the Prime Minister, that we really haven’t seen any prominence allocated to this within any of the Brexit negotiations. In fact, the first question I asked of the Prime Minister was why research had barely been mentioned at all in her Queen’s speech after the general election, despite being so important.”

Dodds laughs, “There are so many other things I could say, I don’t really know where to start!”

I can tell there are.

Andrew Adonis proposes college for underrepresented students

Simon Hunt
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Andrew Adonis proposes college for underrepresented students

Lord Andrew Adonis has called for the creation of new undergraduate colleges at Oxford and Cambridge as a means to improving “access with excellence” to the universities for students from underrepresented backgrounds.

The former Minister of State for Education suggested that founding new colleges with the specific mission of attracting applicants from state schools whose students do not usually apply would be more effective in increasing the number of state school pupils in Oxford and Cambridge than current outreach programmes and proposals such as implementing diversity-focused quotas.

Under the proposals, educational charities such as Ark and Harris would be recruited as college founders with the task of creating “1,000 or more” additional places each year. The  colleges would set precedents at the university for new ways of recruiting students not from an Oxbridge tradition.

In an interview with Cherwell, Adonis said: “What we now need is bold dramatic reform which can only happen by significantly expanding the number of places at Oxford and allocating those additional places for widening participation.

“By far the best way to achieve that is to have colleges which are focused like a laser on the task of widening access and aren’t part of the existing college system.”

In response to the accusation that state-school-only colleges could create social divisions within Oxford, the Labour Peer said: “All students are on a par at Oxford and mixed together freely so I don’t think that there’s an issue of segregation at all.

“The reason for doing this is not to segregate students but to expand access, and at the moment that is not being done.

“It would be perverse to argue against a bold but practical initiative to expand access on the grounds that it would be better if these students weren’t there at all.”

Senior figures at Oxford University have not yet expressed strong support for the proposals, with some suggesting that the plan would create a socially divided university atmosphere. Professor Martin Williams, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Oxford, told Cherwell: “We share Lord Adonis’ aspiration to ensure the opportunities of an Oxford education are open to all talented students but his plan does not offer the across-the-board change we are looking for.”

“We know that our undergraduates value the chance to mix with and learn from fellow students of all backgrounds, including our international students.

“Oxford colleges were once segregated on the basis of gender and we don’t want to create new divisions on any grounds.”

David Lammy MP, also a former Labour education minister, had previously proposed the centralisation of Oxford’s admissions system as a means to improve access to the university. Adonis was unenthusiastic about centralisation, telling Cherwell: “It may be a desirable thing to do, but it’s simply not going to happen because the location of power in the university lies with the colleges, so short of a root and branch reform of the governance of Oxford – which isn’t going to happen – it’s going nowhere as a proposal.

“The way we’ve always brought about big reform in the past in Oxford where underrepresented groups – whether they be graduates or women, or religious minorities – get proper representation at Oxford is to make new colleges.

“In fact almost every new college in Oxford has been set up with a dedicated mission in mind.”

Adonis was supportive of the Foundation Year course at Lady Margaret Hall, but suggested that it did not make enough of an impact in expanding Oxford’s access and outreach: “If you look at what’s happening in LMH, I applaud what’s being done, but the numbers are very small.

“If we had three colleges set up, that’s 500 more students a year.”

Though Adonis said he was “keen to help found one of these colleges” he did not express any intention to be formally associated with a new Oxford college: “I can absolutely guarantee in blood that no college which I play any part in founding will have my name attached to it or to any building which is a part of it.

“One Adonis in England is quite enough.”

Lunch with Cherwell: Giles Coren

Darius Parvizi-Wayne
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Lunch with Cherwell: Giles Coren

Lunch with Giles Coren is a unique affair. Sitting inside Pompette in Summertown, which is excellent by the way, he was not the bull-in-the-china shop one might expect given his media demeanour. Composed and self-assured, he could have easily been mistaken for just another restaurant-goer; that is until the nervous giddiness of the owner highlighted the importance of the man and his review. Coren tells me that he always informs the owners of the deliciousness of their food because if he does not, “they will worry for weeks.” With the waiters he becomes a real foodie – a term he certainly does not attribute to himself – discussing the transparency of wine, the gluttonous nature of snails and so on. In fact, this tendency to chat with the staff acted as a general symbol of the man’s personality. It was not clear to me whether Giles’s brain works faster than his mouth or vice-versa, but what often resulted was a stream of ideas, often relatively unconnected, sometimes venturing into dark and taboo alleys. Seemingly interested in everything, in around two hours we cover an impressive plethora of topics, from his time at Oxford to his unexpectedly late introduction to pornography, and everything in between.

Coren is perhaps best known for his involvement in a number of controversies. His Wikipedia page has its own ‘Controversies’ section, for Christ’s sake. I question him about his seemingly uncontrollable tendency to write outlandish things, and his response is, on one hand, as expected: “if you want to have a f***ing great time, you have to turn up the volume.” He uses Piers Morgan as an example, stating: “if you’re a d*** like Piers Morgan, but you ramp it up, you get a massive c***, but he’s incredibly successful… and a brilliant journalist.”

However, this is not to say that Coren is unaware that his rhetoric must have limits. As he firmly puts it, the things he says “cannot be racist, sexist, homophobic.” At another point, he says he does not want to be “the Donald Trump of journalism.” When I ask if he feels pangs of insecurity after being criticised, Coren’s guard briefly drops, and signs of vulnerability appear. “The race thing really beat me up… I look back and wonder if I would have done things differently”, he admits, referring to an incident in which he phonetically interpreted the utterings of a Chinese man on the other end of the phone. He also confesses to occasionally going too far, citing a Twitter spat he had with the former political editor of the Guardian. In this interaction, he informs said editor that “my father [the late Alan Coren] says you f*** little girls.” Not too much concern, though, for it “only slightly spoilt the weekend.”

Given Coren’s unabashed openness, I decide to dig a little deeper into the specific scandals. I enquire about the time he called his son a “fat, little b******” in Esquire, an apparent rare instance of fat-shaming one’s own family member. He exclaims: “You see there is a problem!”. He first lambastes Wikipedia for permitting the surfacing of such flash statements without context. As he clarifies, some people may look upon his son as a “fat, little b******”, but Coren never said that he actually is one. He continues. In that article he also described his daughter as “being skinny as a cricket.” He justifies this by claiming that, in a contrastive sense, he was actually “praising” his daughter for her slimness. As he puts it, whereas his son is “made out [of] cake”, she is “made out of sticks and lego.”

Intimately tied up with all of Coren’s notoriety, and our conversation for that matter, is his remarkably unapologetic inclination to swear. His response is immediately simple: “they’re just good words.” Nonetheless, as with all of his responses, there are layers of complexity that Coren’s mind must explore. He firstly explains that he only swears on Twitter. Why this platform exclusively? Coren adds: “Twitter is a worthless, worthless thing. You, 200,000 people that follow me, should get a f***ing  life, go out and get some fresh air. If you want to read me creating great big Roman f***ing sentences, with carefully thought out constructions, buy the f***ing newspaper. If you’re some cheap c***, who is just going to look at Twitter, it’s just going to be f*** f*** f*** bollocks bollocks bollocks, why the f*** should I give you any more than that. Swearing is funny. It’s time to disengage your brain.”

I can’t resist bringing up the infamous nosh-gate incident, a leaked email from Coren to a sub-editor in which the former furiously reprimands the latter for amending his work. He offers a backstory to this saga: “It was just a couple months after my dad had died, so I was feeling particularly angry. It was 1am and I was really very drunk.” What follows is Coren’s both acoustic and behavioural impersonation of a chimp, suggesting the carnal baseness of this email. A particularly amusing moment is when he quotes a section from the letter in which he writes: “I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve f***ing stripped it out like a p***ed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking Jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it.” He informs me that the greatest ambiguity in the email is the relationship between Jesus and the bear, a connection that has no Biblical precedent. He clarifies that in his drunken stupor he missed out a letter: “It was meant to be beard!”.  A decade of confusion finally resolved.

Our conversation gradually proceeds beyond Coren’s controversies. Considering that this is my first time meeting the man, it is particularly surprising how open Coren is about his sexual experiences in his youth. Then I remind myself – well, this is Giles Coren, after all. The first thing he notes about his time in Oxford is his “greatest mistake”, that being the fact that he came with a girlfriend. At first, he is characteristically jovial: “I was getting laid, and having gone to a single sex school, I thought that may never happen.” He soon, however, becomes genuinely affectionate: “We loved each other, and she was brilliant, and it was great fun.”

In fact, Coren’s adoration for the people in his past soon transforms into a form of deification. He alludes to another girlfriend: “the most beautiful girl in Oxford.” He then takes ten minutes to recount the life story of a close Syrian friend he had at Keble, breathlessly squeezing in every last detail, often amending minor aspects in order to ensure that I have the perfect, most holistic account possible. There’s no need for Coren to do this: in most conversations a nonchalant mention would have been sufficient. Not in his world. A former English undergraduate, Coren treats the people around him and his memories of them as if they are literary figures, giving them free life through his words. Graduating only thirty years ago, he speaks of Oxford as if it is a distant land, nostalgically reminiscing over the days of ‘pidge-posting’ and wrapped up letters on doors. He is also utterly perplexed by the college family system. “Are you supposed to f*** her?”, he asks of my college wife. Genuinely intrigued, he seems a potty-mouthed incarnation of Evelyn Waugh.

It is interesting that among two food critics – one vastly more experienced than the other – so little is spoken of food. When I ask him if people come up to him and try to speak to him about food, he replies: “I don’t really want to talk about food. I like reading, I like getting an early night, I like f***king, and I like playing with my kids. Two completely separate activities, of course.”

Read Coren’s account of his lunch with Darius in The Times  

Oxford Museums and the Artefacts of Colonialism

Lydia Stephens
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Oxford Museums and the Artefacts of Colonialism

The repatriation discussion is one which fitfully reoccurs whenever a high profile case will reach the mainstream media. In May 2018, the V&A considered returning Ethiopian treasures to the city of Maqdala. Very little has been heard about this since. More recently, however, the debate has been gaining important ground. Museum after museum have been caught up in it: the V&A, the British Museum, and recently Oxford’s own Pitt Rivers. But why now? Such artefacts have been in Britain for centuries, so why, given the more pressing political questions, are we discussing repatriation?

Author Rhiannon Lucy Cosset argues Brexit has had a major influence on the repatriation debate; it “chisels away any right Britain had to the Parthenon Marbles,” which were taken in the 19th Century, among other artefacts. Since we are jettisoning ourselves from the EU, she argues, our claims to items belonging to other EU countries seem increasingly tenuous. However, the British Museum, whilst a contentious case, got away unscathed. Resistance against repatriation continues – perhaps because the debate itself is a colossal misnomer. Referring to our beloved national museum as “The British Museum” seems comical given much of its contents are not British at all.

When talk of repatriation come up, Brits will get defensive. Objects that have been in your country for your entire lifetime can feel British. However, prior to our own lives, these objects had a history that was pre-British; and pre-colonial. This is a fact we fail to engage with time and time again.

As it stands legally, there are no laws requiring nations to return items back to their country of origin. In 2007 the UN commissioned the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP seeks to facilitate repatriation, but only applies only to human remains, and ceremonial objects. Moreover, UNDRIP is non-binding. In some instances, museums have seen fit to return objects – the University of Birmingham returned Aboriginal remains and objects of spiritual significance to Australia. But this was their choice, and what British museums will do is ultimately a British decision.

But who are we to even declare our decision is ‘final’? Shockingly, over 40% of the UK have deemed the Empire a good thing. Presumably former colonies would disagree, but we still see it as our call. It is no wonder so many are comfortable with their colonial history given how much we refuse to engage with it. Words like ‘acquisition’ ‘exchange’ and ‘donate’ do not tell the whole story as much as ‘stealing’ might. 

The Pitt Rivers houses over 300,000 objects, one of which is a bracelet, an orkatar, sacred to the Maasai tribe who recently visited the museum. According to the database, [the orkatar] was “donated” to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1904 by Alfred Claud Hollis, a colonial administrator in British East Africa, but there is no information about how it came into his hands. How can a stolen object be “donated”? Historian David Olusoga has said the same of the Benin bronzes (which currently are held in the British Museum), and declared that if Britain want to keep and display stolen objects, they need to be clear about their history and where they come from.

Many have noted that a primary purpose of museums is to teach history. Lying about the history of objects, then, seems counterproductive. Moreover, the Pitt Rivers has encountered major problems in contextualising its possessions, and the Maasai tribe’s visit was partly to help rectify this. The Pitt Rivers’ database was allegedly full of errors and gaps: one object marked as a Maasai bracelet was revealed to actually be an anklet.

All of this aside, there are, of course, many valid reasons not to return items to the countries where they are from. Dr Jharna Gourlay responded to arguments made by Olusoga noting the practicalities of repatriation: “More people come to Britain to see these artefacts. How many of them will go to Pakistan or Afganistan?”

A more compelling argument is that were these items to be returned, there is no guarantee they would be safe there. Some ex-colonies suffer the threat of fundamentalism. Gourlay cites what “happened to the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and Babri Masjid in India, and what Isis did in Syria,” as an argument against repatriation. However, he argues overall, and most compellingly, that ex-colonies who “claim restitution in the form of returns of goodies encourages cheap sentimentalism.”

Perhaps this “cheap sentimentalism” is the problem. Repatriation ought to be more than a simple shipping of objects and a begrudging rearrangement of museum displays; it should involve understanding and apology, as part of the more important process of decolonising. We imagine colonialism happened in the past, and are affronted at the idea of apologising in 2018 for atrocities committed hundreds of years ago. But to pretend what was done in the past has little to no bearing on the present would be foolish. The ramifications of Britain’s colonial past still have bearing on the present day, and one need only look around Oxford to see this.

Whilst other nations like France have recently began negotiations to send colonial-era objects back to Africa, Britain has yet to do the same. Oxford, which claims to be a centre of learning should surely have some motivation to help. If museums such as the Pitt Rivers are for learning, they need to take a hands on approach to decolonisation in a way that isn’t tokenistic but actually engaged.

Some may argue repatriation is not the way to engage with British history, and perhaps it is not. But how can we continue to prioritise our own curiosity over the needs of those from whom we have robbed? The contents of the Pitt Rivers for the Maasai tribe to whom they belong are not “historical curiosities” – they are part of a living culture. It may be too much to ask people to engage in a past that they weren’t directly involved in, and to make up for thefts committed before their time. But a certain level of compassion for these existing cultures wouldn’t go amiss.

Olusoga, in a talk in Oxford, described seeing a British Ship in a museum in Holland. He explained the strange feeling of seeing something from your own culture, albeit your culture’s past, in a foreign museum, making it not too difficult to imagine how the ‘acquired’ contents of our own museums would make others feel. Whether repatriation is the way forwards, it seems difficult to conceive of an educated future when we will not fully engage with the past.

Film First: a box of tissues are needed for the first film to make me cry

Michael Shao
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Film First: a box of tissues are needed for the first film to make me cry

I would often chase fireflies around in my backyard as a child, in a time when both myself and my perception of the fate of the fireflies I caught were the products of ignorant bliss. My friends and I would catch them in the palms of our hands before gently sliding them into plastic water bottles and large Ziploc bags. We created luminescent lanterns and radiant pouches filled with little stars, or whatever else our imaginations decided on that given night. The way they flushed a warm yellow were akin to the summers in which they were caught: unhurried, yet deliberate.

Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata, tells the story of a teenage boy named Seita and his younger sister, Setsuko, who both live in Kobe, Japan, during World War II. From the get go, the film ramps up your emotions and dispenses with the pleasantries. The film’s first shot depicts a janitor examining Seita’s lifeless body, from which his spirit emerges to join Setsuko’s – the audience learns instantly of the fate of the film’s main characters. Takahata immediately pushes further, depicting in the following gut-wrenching scene a moment months earlier. Seita and Setsuko escape the firebombing of Japan conducted by the United States near the end of the War that left much of the nation in ashes – and their mother dead and mummified, her burn wounds oozing blood through the bandages.

Takahata’s challenge to the audience is two-fold: to scar them in the first ten minutes, and then to see if he can beat the law of diminishing returns and make them cry until their eyes turn red for the next hour.

Takahata has no fear of raising tensions too high. After the death of their mother and in light of the uncertain fate of their father, a Japanese Naval Admiral, Seita and Setsuko stay with their aunt. In the desperation of wartime, their aunt feeds them just enough rice to survive and sells their mother’s precious kimonos for more rice. Takahata takes great patience in communicating the loss of all familial responsibility in survival mode – not through the melodrama typical of western war films, but through long, painstakingly patient shots that allow reality to slowly sink in.

Seita and Setsuko eventually move to a cave in the hills nearby with enough money to buy food. However, the audience gradually realizes that there is no more food to buy. Setsuko grows weak and malnourished. There is no dramatic reveal in which the starving character emerges suddenly, thin and frail; Setsuko’s fate is slowly planted into the audience’s minds, until they, like Seita, understand the inevitable. A heartbreaking scene shows Seita preparing dinner for Setsuko, using mud to make the rice balls.

Yet there are glimpses of beauty among this suffering that Takahta catches in the landscapes of the beautiful Japanese countryside, and in a scene in which Seita and Setsuko catch fireflies and use them to illuminate the cave. They are soon brought back to a harrowing reality, as they wake up the next morning to find all the fireflies dead. Setsuko uses the little strength she has left to bury them.

Takahata pulls at the heartstrings in a brutally unconventional manner. There is no romantic heartbreak, no dramatic twist, and no puppies killed. The film succeeds in part for the same reason that Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List did; it tells a tragic story through painfully empathetic scenes, eschewing overused tropes or dramatic gimmicks that culminate in the melodramatic payoffs everybody was expecting.

The film teaches us a great deal about war in its brief 89-minute duration, and perhaps in the simplest way possible. War is not a game of Risk, or merely the black and white film reels depicting soldiers and machine gun fire on Omaha Beach. War is the mother who is raped, the child who is orphaned, and the village filled with uninvolved citizens deprived of the full and rich lives they once might have lived. War is the reaper that looms over 17 million Yemeni women and children, and the Vietnamese who still suffer birth defects to this day from the lasting effects of Agent Orange. War is the domino theory and The Clash of Civilizations that is easy to read on paper and stomach when we forget or misconstrue what war really is.

The grave in which Seita and Setsuko’s fireflies were buried is not only shallow, but a reminder of the transitory nature of things that seem modest in the moment, but are reflective of the wider locus of our lives. The conservation that it takes to preserve these creatures – to preserve peace – is often taken for granted. Takahata’s work is crucial in its circumventing of human forgetfulness through meaningful, cinematic reminder.

The old stomping grounds where I caught the fireflies were real and defined, with images of the dying oak tree off in the distance and the potent smell of grass in the summer burned into my memory. We typically think of animation as being separate from reality, whereas motion pictures seem to carry greater power through the lens of a camera. And yet, no film, animated or otherwise, has ever felt as real to me as Grave of the Fireflies. Zach Braff’s 2004 comedy-drama Garden State was shot quite literally in my backyard, yet Seita and Setsuko, despite their improbably large eyes and sketched-out mouths, feel more real to me. Takahata boils down the whole range of human suffering and joy into an impeccably chosen set of diamond-in-the-rough moments. Though the style of animation threatens to make war seem distant and fictitious, Takahata creates an emotional experience that not even Brokeback Mountain and Requiem for a Dream could accomplish.

Grave of the Fireflies is a film that communicates and confers raw feeling upon its viewer like no other. It is a film that Roger Ebert once said “belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made”. Watch it with a loved one, with your family, or by yourself. Just be sure to bring a few boxes of tissues.

Chris Grayling has really outdone himself this time!

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Chris Grayling has really outdone himself this time!

The Rt Hon Chris Grayling MP is a deeply odd man, even by the high standards of the Tory party. In each of his three ministerial roles, he has a frankly impressive record of removing funding from the most essential services he could get his hands on. As Minister of State for Employment, he made about 20,000 of his own employees redundant. Genius! In his role as Justice Minister, he reduced state legal aid ensuring the poorest people would be even more unfairly treated by a so-called justice system. Bravo, Chris! You’ve outdone yourself.

You may be wondering how he could beat that in terms of sheer counter-intuitiveness; how he could possibly cut something more ridiculously fundamental. Well, never knowingly overestimated, Grayling has managed it. Take a moment to sympathise with his position. You’re a Transport Secretary seemingly hellbent on cutting necessities. You have a straightforward mission: get someone with a few boats to move some cargo across the Channel. What’s the most essential thing you could tamper with? What’s the most imaginative way to balls up this remarkably simple task? Whatever you’ve come up with, it’s not insane enough. Chris Grayling has awarded a freight ferry contract… to a company that owns no ferries.

Seaborne Freight, the company in question, is clearly an establishment held in the highest esteem by Grayling. We must take him at his word that they were researched thoroughly. At the time of writing, however, their website boasts a peculiarly empty timetable, because there’s nothing to put on it. In case you forgot, THEY OWN NO FERRIES! They have less than three months to acquire ferries, hire and train staff, and start running services. They have already reported delays to this process.

I don’t know what Grayling imagined would happen. Perhaps he thought that, come the day of Brexit, he’d tip up to Ramsgate port ready to unveil his new trade route. He’d cut the ribbon on the crane and watch as it ceremoniously dumped the shipping containers into the sea, just where the ferries should be. One by one, the containers would fall to the floor of the Channel, laden down by crates of Britain’s main post-Brexit export: jam. The national anthem would play, and Grayling would be lauded throughout for his uncompromising belief in Brexit.

One is moved to wonder what Chris Grayling would be like in other jobs. While his propensity to cut everything except his expenses (he claimed £5000 to redecorate his taxpayer-funded apartment in Pimlico, less than 20 miles from his constituency home) might make him a good DFS salesman or hairdresser, there are very few other jobs you could see him excelling in . As a teacher he’d probably get rid of the pupils and teach to an empty classroom. If he drove an ice-cream van, he’d pull up to the curb playing “Turkey in the Straw”, turn the engine off, and start handing out empty cones to bitterly disappointed children…If he were a road safety officer, he’d throw away his lollipop and high-vis and just stand beside the road, watching the cars speed past.

Grayling will be remembered as Transport Secretary for several things: telling ministers in Japan – home of the bullet train – that the UK has better trains than them; failing to remove a single drone from above the UK’s second largest airport; and claiming cycle lanes were “a problem for road users” after knocking a man off his bike with a car door. Even amongst such strong competition, the decision to award the contract is his strangest gaffe yet.

The Lady’s Mad Review – ‘a triumph’

Paul Nash
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The Lady’s Mad Review – ‘a triumph’

Thistledown Theatre’s production of Rebekah King’s new play The Lady’s Mad has toured around the UK during December, with performances at Holy Trinity, Stratford, Somerville College, Oxford, and the Corn Exchange, Wallingford (where I saw it).

Both the play, and the production, are a triumph. Set during the English Civil War, the story concerns Lady Hester Cavill, who receives a delegation from the Roundhead soldiers who have arrived in the parish to seek aid from the Cavill family, particularly Hester’s Parliamentarian husband Sir Arthur. But Hester herself is a Royalist and, in her husband’s absence, refuses to help. Thus begins a stand-off between the Cavill family in their fortified mansion, and the rebel troops who are led, or inspired, by ‘Mad Moll’, the prophetess from ‘the Playhouse at Southwark’. The conflict thus revolves around the two women and their disparate ideologies.

The plot has its roots in historical fact, albeit with the conflict and its protagonists operating within fictional paradigms. Hester is surrounded by her family (including her sister Eleanor, who claims – like Moll – to be a prophetess) and, as the drama mounts, finds herself in the position of having to capitulate to the rebels. To do so without betraying her King she asks her daughter to help her feign madness; thus, the climax of the play is a meeting between two ‘mad’ women: Moll – who is, we find, far from mad – and the equally sane Lady Hester, who attempts to play the part of a madwoman. The play concludes with two ballad-sellers meeting on the road and striking a deal that they will compete to sell a ballad each – one tragic, one comic – based on the story of how ‘two madwomen fought each other for a castle’. Thus the story becomes distorted and sensationalized in a ballad carried around the country as news.

This distortion of truth by the media is one of several subtle messages of the play. One can read parallels with other conflicts, notably between the Civil War of the 1640s and the political divisions of Britain in our own time. There are obvious feminist overtones to the story too, and the play explores the complex roles – both positive and negative – of women during the Civil War. However, on the whole, the narrative avoids moralising and is essentially a story of people, of personalities, caught up in a national conflict with deep social, political, and religious roots. The play is all the better for presenting a human drama rather than more overt symbolism.

The performances, handled by a small cast with some parts doubled-up, are all excellent. Sarah Pyper as Lady Hester has the hardest (and largest) role and carries it off brilliantly. Craig Finlay is splendid as the Roundhead Lieutenant and the tragic balladeer, and Hannah Wilmshurst (in a series of breeches roles) matches him as the comic balladeer, Hester’s younger son Charles, and a Roundhead soldier. Emily Saddler brings a calm authority to Mad Moll, and Laurence Goodwin is excellent as the foolish and self-regarding Eleanor (the only truly unsympathetic character in the play). Billy Moreton impresses as the elder son James, and Daisy Howard shines too in the difficult role of the daughter Anne – a character at once modest and self-effacing, yet quietly deceptive.

The sets, costumes, music, and lighting are all simple, but support the performances well. The director, Nathan Peter Grassi, must take a good deal of credit for the overall success of the play, as indeed must the author. Rebekah King’s script catches the tone and language of the period very well, and is full of drama and wit; sometimes bent to comic effect, but usually deployed to sharpen the exchanges between the characters. The transitions between scenes and between tones (as between the meeting of the two ‘mad’ women, which is intense and cerebral, and the two ballad-sellers, at once witty and bawdy) are handled well by both writer and players. Indeed, it is hard to find anything to complain of in the production. The only criticisms I can make are of a couple of small points in the presentation: the books which lie on Hester’s desk are clearly not of the seventeenth century, and Miss Wilmshurst’s tights in the final scene are rather more Folies Bergère than they are Civil War. However, these criticisms will be perceived for what they are – mere anachronisms.

Books to buy in the first few months of 2019

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Books to buy in the first few months of 2019

Writing this significantly increased the chances of me buying at least seven new novels this term, despite having a whole dissertation to write, so in reading this, you may be at risk of finding yourself some new must–buy books..

Return of a Popular 2018 Author: Mr Salary: Faber Stories by Sally Rooney (January 3rd)

Sally Rooney is a name that I have seen everywhere after her 2018 second novel Normal People was recently long-listed for the exciting Man Booker Prize. It seems a lot of people got a hold of, read, and loved, both of Rooney’s books in 2018 and whether you are one of those people, or, like me, are yet to read any, you might want to add her short story Mr Salary to your 2019 to–read list

Retelling of an old story: An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma (January 8th)

Just like his first novel, The Fishermen, which was published in 2015, Chigozie Obioma’s second novel is influenced and inspired by both classical Greek tragedy and the mythology of his home country of Nigeria. As another Man Booker Prize long-listed author, his second novel is a book that readers of the first will be eager to get a hold of, but there is no reason that anyone couldn’t pick up a copy of this contemporary retelling of the Odyssey, narrated by the spirit of the chi, or spirit of a poultry farmer.

Beautiful book cover: The Binding by Bridget Collins, (January 10th)

I first saw The Binding on Twitter and, as much as I know that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, instantly wanted to get my hands on a copy so that I could admire the stunning blue, brown and gold cover in real life. Then I found out that it was a book about books and the likelihood of me soon owning it further increased. The historical fantasy follows the story of Emmett, who becomes an apprentice Bookbinder in a world where memories can be forgotten by sealing them in a book.

A few nights in fantasy Paris: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (January 15th)

This Young Adult fantasy, from the author of the 2016 novel The Star–Touched Queen, is set in a dangerous alternate nineteenth-century Paris. As with The Binding, the physical copy is stunning, making me wonder if fantasy authors have a love of intricate covers. It follows a diverse cast of characters attempting to find an ancient artefact. I am currently reading and loving Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and it has been said that if you like Bardugo’s novel you will almost certainly enjoy this, so I personally can’t wait to give it a read.

Drastic genre change: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (February 5th)

His 2014 book A Brief History of Seven Killings may have taken the literary world by storm, having won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, but in his latest novel, Jamaican-born writer Marlon James chose to leave historical fiction behind in favour of fantasy. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, James’ weaves imagination with African history and mythology to form the first book in his new Dark Startrilogy, set in a world in which there are thirteen kingdoms, a wealth of adventure and a sense that not everyone is telling the truth.

Non–fiction I’m most ready to read: It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race – edited by Mariam Khan (February 21st)

I am actually good friends with the sister of the Miriam Khan, the editor of It’s Not About the Burqa and have been since we shared a table in a sixth-form class. Since then I have heard a few updates on her very cool sister, who managed to get a job in publishing and edited this book, a collection of voices which are rarely represented in the media. It really deserves to be read by all.

Most anticipated sequel: Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi (March 5th)

Tomi Adeyemi’s debut young adult fantasy, Children of Blood and Bone, was released in 2018 and topped multiple bestseller lists, but Adeyemi’s novel made the press before the book was even released, when the seven–figure deal for the rights to her book led people to compare it to Harry Potter. The West-African inspired story is stunning – I sped through the first novel and cannot wait to return to the well-crafted world. The film rights for the first book may have been secured by Fox but there is certainly time to catch up on the series before both film and second book are released.

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