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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."

Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

In 1881, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was published privately in 250 copies. It purports to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a...

Review: ‘American Dirt’

There was high expectation placed in American Dirt, what with Oprah Winfrey evangelising on Apple TV and a flood of celebrity endorsements on Twitter and...

Violent Music – Acaster’s ‘Perfect Sound Whatever’

Perfect Sound Whatever is comedian James Acaster’s part-memoir, part-encyclopaedic recount of the records that made 2016 the Greatest Year for Music of All Time,...

The Challenge of Maintaining a Legacy

January 2020 has brought with it the deaths of both Christopher Tolkien, son of J. R. R. Tolkien, and Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce. The...

The Enduring Legacy of Pippi Longstocking

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Pippi Longstocking’s arrival at Villa Villekulla. In her first appearance Astrid Lindgren’s eponymous heroine fascinates her neighbours,...

The Death of Jesus

The world of J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus novels – a trilogy which has accounted for most of the author’s output in the last decade – is not easy...

Review: ‘Howards End is on the Landing’

Oxford time does not have the rhythms of ordinary time. There are very few moments for extended, contemplative, peaceful reading, of the sort which...

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...

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