Books
Bust?: Saving the Economy, Democracy and our Sanity by Robert Peston and Kishan Koria- Review
"So long as we have an economic system geared towards the accumulation of wealth rather than the acquisition of it, inequalities will continue to widen"
Book recommendations from the editors’ desk
"It’s rare that I find non-fiction to be such a page-turner, but Tara Westover’s autobiography was just that."
Greg Heffley: A Hero of Our Time
Few modern comic heroes align with our distinctive age – an age which Dickens’s...
The man of the moment: Review of Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
"Baldwin does his best to humanise Starmer and to deflate the view of him as “Mr Boring”."
Review: Chaucer Here and Now, Weston Library
"Mansplaining scribes, scandalised censors, and unfinished endings. Even from day one, there is no stable and single Chaucer."
Sense and Sexibility: A definitive ranking of Austen’s leading men
Welcome to my definitive ranking of Austen’s romantic heroes and, as an auxiliary ranking that I was not actually asked to add, my favourite...
Review: The Artist’s Way
This is both a book review and a book recommendation. Julia Cameron’s book - The Artist’s Way - is the perfect book to pick...
A country without libraries: what we are missing
You might think that working in a library would be a nice, peaceful job. That’s what I thought too. After spending two years working...
Friday Favourite: The Neapolitan Quartet
In a rare interview with LA Times in 2018, Elena Ferrante, universally-celebrated, elusive (the name is a pseudonym) author of the Neapolitan novels, was...
Review: Lovecraft Country
I bought Lovecraft Country back in term time, and, as with far too many books, didn’t get around to reading it until much later....
‘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...
Friday Favourite: Jane Eyre
In Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, the protagonist spends her teenage years at Lowood School – an institution with a cast of cruel...
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...
