A new secondhand bookstore opened in Oxford city centre last week. Located in the Golden Cross shopping centre, just off Cornmarket Street, the bookstore stocks hundreds of secondhand books, ranging from accessibly priced paperbacks to rare and expensive antiquarian first-editions.
‘I love selling out’ declared Charli XCX when speaking to NPR about Crash, released in March, a project which sees her lean into mainstream pop, ironically playing the part of an industry ‘sell-out’.
“I tend to be attracted to stories about outsiders,” Schwartz tells me at the beginning of our call, “about people who feel themselves not part of the culture or not part of the mainstream if you will, and are trying to figure out how to fit in, and what the cost is of doing so.”
A film that rests so prominently in the public’s psyche can be difficult to watch subjectively. The Godfather is nonetheless a masterpiece in its own right.
If Thomas Hardy had blessed his female characters with more than an “ephemeral precious essence of youth,” perhaps he would have produced something along the lines of Dorothy McDowell’s Casterbridge, an adaptation of Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
"Against the backdrop of Majek’s enigmatic blue-toned figures, Spencer, with the help of a multi-roling, all-Black voice cast playing a broad spectrum of characters, reveals tantalising glimpses of these figures’ lives."
"It’s a bit of a mad play, and a lot of quite mad things happen, because that’s what happens when you translate Victorian characters into the modern era."
"From the play’s beginning, this immensely talented cast of Oxford students captured my imagination, and I was swept up by the story they had to tell."