Tuesday 21st 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...
Books Benjamin Waterer -

Algorithms of individuality: ‘The Consciousness Company’

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

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....
Books Rosa Moore -

What literary character is your college?

Oxford’s colleges are all infamous for different reasons, and come with their own unique...
Books Hannah Becker -
Latest

Review: The Places I’ve Cried in Public

"The book tackles abusive relationships in a way that allows younger (and older) readers to realise the many forms abuse can take."

Friday Favourite: The Cairo Trilogy

“A historical allegory that mirrors political events through the livelihood of the Al-Jawad family, it is a seminal work of modern Arabic literature and is crucial to understanding Egypt’s modern history, society and culture.”

The language of Pride: five books I read in the closet

"As well as the direct dialogue from writer to reader, I realised that I was just one of a larger readership: an intoxicating mix of individual and collective experience that was validating above all else."

In defence of self-help

"It took my own experience of trauma to recognise that maligning self-help can contribute to disempowerment, and to think non-judgementally about the traumas which might have led other people to seek self-help and self-care."

Friday Favourite: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

"The novella’s real focus is the inevitability of death itself, which is so gargantuan, physically and philosophically, that retrospection is crushed into irrelevance."

The future of bookshops is more uncertain than ever

"In the wake of Covid-19, it remains to be seen whether bookshops will continue to encourage our love of browsing."

“The frailty of everything revealed at last”: dystopian fiction in a time of crisis

"Dystopian narratives may be bleak, but they do not contribute to the barbarity of our times: they are, instead, a powerful reminder that in the midst of crisis, beauty and hope do remain."

Review: Florence Given’s debut book Women Don’t Owe You Pretty

Florence Given sells feminism as what it is: freeing and utterly delicious. She affirms and articulates precisely the points it feels so hard to put your finger on sometimes.

Fact and Fiction: Where Should the Boundary Lie?

Novels, TV shows, films. They are a form of art. And in art there is no wrong answer. Yet this becomes more complex for historical...

Classic Letdowns: Proust

Disclaimer – I have not read the full 3000 pages of this story, nor do I intend to. The reasons for this will become...

Friday Favourite: David Harsent

There is something about poetry that makes it more potent than fiction in times of need. With its raw, brash and yet strangely beautiful...

Murakami’s ‘Killing Commendatore’: where art can transport you

Murakami’s Killing Commendatore got me thinking about art within literature. We can easily find examples of literature within art: Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Millais’ Ophelia,...

Classic Letdowns: Vanity Fair

Googling the words Vanity Fair brings up a popular publication, a 2004 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and a 2018 BBC show, and finally, the...

The Dangers of Genre-lisation

Within a week, the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, which explores the oeuvre of two teenage lovers, was requested on BBC...

Friday Favourite: The Uninhabitable Earth

The book currently on top of my ever-growing ‘To Read’ pile is David Wallace-Well’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Based on his 2017 essay of the...

Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes offers an origin story for everyone’s favourite evil-but-unequivocally-stylish dictator, President Snow. For the uninitiated, his achievements in the...

Thoughts on the gifting of a book

In search of a distraction in the gloom of mid-April, I sorted through my bookshelves, where half-read prelims texts obscured teen fiction and discarded...

Review: The Mirror and the Light

The final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy finds her writing with more lyricism and force than ever before, and cements her prestige as...

Students review their favourite audiobooks

'Good Omens' by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman, read by Martin JarvisI love the idea of audiobooks but often struggle to find one I...

The societal consequences of the prosthetic womb in Helen Sedgwick’s ‘The Growing Season’

Imagining a world where reproductive technology has evolved to popularise prosthetic wombs, Helen Sedgwick’s ‘The Growing Season’ toes the line between utopia and dystopia...
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