Books

The Secret History Characters as Oxford Tropes

Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History is set in an exclusive college in Vermont but can be read as a satire of Oxford and its students. It invites us to question how little differentiates us from the elitist American universities.
Books Christina Scote -

Review: The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe

There are some writers whose line of literary descent is so clear as to...
Books Hassan Akram -

BookTok: The Last Page of the Publishing Industry?

The #booktok stands that have become fixtures of bookshops across the country inspire intense...
Books Maya Heuer-Evans -

Defiance: Racial Injustice, Police Brutality, A Sister’s Fight for the Truth by Janet Alder

At Oxford’s Wesley Memorial Church, Janet Alder offered a harrowing and unflinching account of resilience in the face of systemic injustice.
Books Asma Issa -
Latest

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘Little Women’: endlessly adaptable?

Another 20 or so years, another Little Women; this time brought to us by acclaimed director Greta Gerwig and starring some of the hottest young actors of...

Top 10 Transformations in Literature

New Year, new you? Let’s see how long this year’s resolutions last. As the festive cheer fades into oblivion and January rears its miserable...

‘Find Me’ Expands Romance and Falls Flat

Find Me is the October 2019 sequel to André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, which was popularised by the success of its 2017 movie adaptation. As a much anticipated...

Ten Politically Inspired Books to Read in 2020

The last three years of politics are enough to make a person want to do some Malcolm Tucker-esque screaming into the void. You can’t...

The Skywalker ‘Saga’

The following article is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoiler-free. In the several weeks leading up to the release of the newest Star Wars...

Who’s afraid of Derrida?

This article is a complaint to my academic discipline, English literature. It is, not to overstate the matter, one of my great loves, but...

Metamorphosis, Money, and Moldovan ice cream

It’s probably unsurprising that while The Guardian hails Ian McEwan’s latest novella as a “comic triumph”, it is dismissed by The Telegraph as “an...

Whose Revolution? The winners, the losers and the left behind

Two clear streams run through Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing– a gut-wrenching tale of intersecting lives at the centre of the Troubles: that of revolution...

ATWOOD RETURNS TO GILEAD

It is difficult to sanitise Atwood’s new venture. In fact, it is difficult to put into words at all the violence of the novel....

Sex and Sensibility: Are ‘Spiced Up’ Adaptations really that progressive?

Pulses were sent racing in 1995 when Andrew Davies’ television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice saw Mr. Darcy, played by a fresh-faced Colin Firth, emerge sopping wet from a lake in a translucent white shirt that barely clung to his torso.

Review: Simon Armitage’s ‘Sandette Light Vessel Automatic’ (Faber, 2019).

Their physical manifestations seem so much a part of the poetic experience that seeing them on a page, relying only on written descriptions for their original context, is almost a tease – a promise of the possibility of an even fuller experience.

How to Read: the Long Vac

Besides the classic value of literature in allowing us to understand perspectives and experiences beyond our own, reading in some ways reminds us of the bigger picture.

‘The Lost Properties of Love’ by Sophie Ratcliffe

'treads a fine line between a deeply personal memoir [...] and an academic exploration'

‘Was it written by aliens, or is it about vampires?’: A Q&A with Daniel Wakelin

"Often important texts appear in humble form, and humble forms often tell us more about the humble people who made and used them." Daniel Wakelin talks to Cherwell about medieval manuscripts.
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