Culture

"Spotify promises to ‘soundtrack your life’. We must be wary of how it’s shaping it." Lucy Kelly questions whether Spotify could become the most addictive social media platform.

For a historian who has made every effort to avoid studying the early history modules, Prime Video’s Vikings was perhaps a surprising viewing choice....

Something crawls up my throat, more bitter than honey.

Death comes, and they draw the curtains – Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.

Go, then - O girl, O derivative of...

Humour me with golden words...

perhaps next time i will kill the bear

I watched Shrek for the first time when I was two years old. It quickly became a daily habit: my parents would plonk me...

My friend and I arrived about thirty minutes late to see Spiral: From the Book of Saw in the cinema. It didn’t particularly matter....

'Nothing is done by halves in this film, including the emotional intensity; when you’re watching, you feel at all times like you’re stuck in Oliver’s head, forced to hear all of his fifteen-year-old-boy thoughts and schemes. The soundtrack follows all of this perfectly, letting Oliver’s state of mind bleed through into the lyrics, which is the key to what makes Turner’s music so powerful and so fitting to the film.'

'In everything from Little Women to My Brilliant Friend, Lady Bird to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, women are offered a pretty clear choice: do you want to be sexy, or clever? Do you want to be stimulated, or happy? According to Mortimer, you can’t have both.'

Spring has been extolled in poetry perhaps more than any other season. Since antiquity, poets have associated spring with growth and celebration making their poems are a joy to read this time of year.

"This juxtaposition characterises the genre: bright, happy elements of club hits mixed with a subversive sly irony that comes with introducing darker lyrical and aesthetic elements." Connor Connolly tackles the explosion in popularity of Hyperpop, and its effects on the music industry.

My first experience of reading a bilingual novel was both painful and involuntary. It was that heady World Cup summer of 2018 – the...

"The energy is less mosh pit, headbanging, and more vulnerable. There’s talk of heartache and relationships crumbling" Poppy Atkinson Gibson finds a different side to the Australian trio, Chase Atlantic, in their latest release, "Beauty in Death".

"'Half Baked' passes the Bechdel test with flying colours. It is truly a feminist triumph and is so refreshing to see an all-female cast on an Oxford stage—something of a rarity, especially in the genre of farce." James Newbery reviews the first live post-Lockdown show in Oxford, "Half Baked" by 00Productions at the North Wall Arts Centre.

'Upon sitting down to write this article, the immense prospect of narrowing down my entire life's reading experience to five books suddenly seemed to stare at me, chasm-like. Life does not always present itself to us in such neat sequences.'

Spoiler alert! The finale of How I Met Your Mother aired in 2014, and its discordance with everything that came before it and unexpected direction...

'What makes a great writer? Practice, of course, and undoubtedly that unique spark called talent or inspiration. But as every writer, great or otherwise, knows, the whole business of writing is built on reading.'

""Great Spans of Muddy Time" finds Doyle in new realms of abstraction, with a record that can feel formless, sometimes almost messy." Frank Milligan ruminates on William Doyle's latest release.