Monday 20th October 2025

Books

On Gravel and Quads: Woolf’s Oxbridge in ‘A Room of One’s Own’

Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own is probably the most important 20th century piece of writing concerning women’s place in literature and education. It illustrates the...

Algorithms of individuality: ‘The Consciousness Company’

As Stephen Fry wrote, The Consciousness Company by M.N. Rosen addresses the “enormous ethical,...

Why all this fuss about ‘Wuthering Heights’?

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice, Greta Gerwig’s Narnia, HBO’s Harry Potter....

What literary character is your college?

Oxford’s colleges are all infamous for different reasons, and come with their own unique...

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: Big Read

‘The guests are met, the feast is set’ and the Ancient Mariner Big Read has begun. On 18th April, the project released its first instalment:...

Reading ‘Neurotribes’ in Autism Acceptance Month

This Autism Awareness Month, I decided to become more aware of the history of the condition I’ve lived with my entire life but was only diagnosed...

Friday Favourite: A Month in the Country

Sometimes you reread a book because it is beautiful; sometimes you do it because a mysterious benefactor on your flight gave you a concerning...

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A study of depression during confinement

TW: discussion of mental illness, suicide “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.” As the...

Friday Favourite: The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a book that I unapologetically love. As an English student with a long reading list, I don’t tend...

Oxford love can hurt like this

Okay, I thought, when I found myself two weeks into lockdown: NOW is the time to finally read that copy of Brideshead Revisited I...

Love, sex and psychedelics in 70s San Francisco

Pride. Sex. Psychedelics. The words spring to mind quickly when thinking of San Francisco in the seventies. Between the tail end of an active...

Bringing together Oxford’s zines

In light of the current coronavirus situation, we at Cherwell are interested in bringing together student zines to publicise Oxford's writing community. Many students in...

Friday Favourite: The Things They Carried

In the perverse manner of a bored and immature conscript in peacetime, I spent my weekends off in 2015 and 2016 consuming as much...

Review: La Peste

‘Nous sommes en guerre’, Macron said in his address to the French nation on 16th March. At the time, my mother and I thought...

Friday Favourite: War and Peace

In this Coronavirus season, existing dystopian novels have suddenly become “prophetic”. The world may be grinding to a standstill, but Generation COVID can’t while...

Comfort Reading in the Time of Covid-19

David Nicholls  If rom-coms are the most comforting type of movie, then David Nicholls writes the most comforting type of novel. He is best known...

‘and all manner of things shall be well’

Jack Glynne-Jones explores how T.S. Eliot provides solace in periods of stress

Review: Diary of a Murderer and Other Stories by Kim Young-Ha

‘It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?’ A serial killer suffering from Alzheimer’s attempts to protect his daughter...

Review: Conversations with Friends

At one point in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, the protagonist, Frances, tells her best friend and former girlfriend, Bobbi: ‘If I could talk like you...

David Copperfield: strikingly modern?

We often speak of a ‘writer for our times’, the ‘voice of a generation’ – there is this need to define our age, to...

Review: That Reminds Me (2019)

Fragmentary, authentic and poetic – Derek Owusu’s latest publication, That Reminds Me, succeeds in its painfully honest exploration of a young Ghanaian boy’s journey into adulthood.  When...

Eco-Fiction

Last November, Waterstones named Greta Thunberg as their ‘author of the year’. Her collection of speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, certainly...

The Modern Memoir

“I can’t believe that we’re on the fifth instalment of my autobiography. As usual with me, the three years since my last book, You Only...

Literary Blackface

When the largest book retailer in the United States, Barnes & Noble, launched their so-called Diverse Editions initiative in honour of Black History Month,...

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