Culture

New Oxford Windrush generation exhibit opens for Black History Month 

Amidst recent political tension provoked by the government’s refusal of slavery reparations to the Caribbean, this year Black History Month is celebrated uniquely in Oxford. The inaugural exhibition at...

“There’s a play in that”: interview with ‘The Gang of Three’ playwright Robert Khan

It’s Budget Day as I sit in the foyer of the Oxford Playhouse. Down...

‘Celebrity Traitors’ season two: Complex and compelling

Reality TV series The Traitors has returned with its celebrity version and has topped viewing charts for a second time. People are hooked on the show where logical reasoning and random chance are simultaneously at play, in a game full of drama, tension, and cliffhangers.

Oxford’s art scene: A picture still being painted

Who gets to make art, who gets to see it, and whose art history...

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...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Interview

Video may have killed the radio star, but Jazz Hands Productions’ radio play A Midsummer Night’s Dream aims towards resurrection, encouraging audiences to “escape...

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...

Notes on Improvisation

Improvisation is a strange topic to think about. On the surface, it seems to be fairly simple: know the chord progression to follow, choose...

Comfort Films: The Secret Garden

It is fascinating to me that nostalgia, coined in the 17th century, was originally treated as a physical disease. Nostalgia was used to describe...

Album Review: Lady Gaga’s ‘Chromatica’

Promoting her latest album on Twitter, Lady Gaga told fans: “listen from beginning to end, no need to shuffle, this is my true story.” Indeed, Chromatica...

‘Too diverse’: the racist backlash to Fred Perry

If you’re a person of colour, or a minority in the UK, it is more than likely that you become desensitised to casual racism....

Finality in film: The sense of an ending

For me, it is always endings, not beginnings, which leave the most lasting impression: the ends of novels, films, historical epochs – even lives....

how i’m feeling now: Hyper-Pop Masterpiece for the Lockdown Generation

Charli XCX’s lockdown productivity is putting us all to shame. On the 6th of April she announced to fans via a public Zoom meeting that...

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...

Review: The 1975’s ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’

Notes on a Conditional Form, the fourth studio album by The 1975, has created its own chaotic history even before its release. The band’s latest record...

Historical Opera: A Primer

The ancient Greeks were so moved by music that in their mythological conception, the father of songs, Orpheus, could move even the rocks. In less fanciful...

Songs of a Pride Cancelled

Pride 2020, which was supposed to be a celebration of our place in the world looking forward to liberation for even more LGBT+ people...

Streaming and the seismic shift in music release formats

Like many of us quietly fascinated with Matty Healy’s prolific output, I recently put in a shift to listen through The 1975’s sprawling new album Notes...

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...

Classic Letdowns: Ulysses by James Joyce

There are some rites of passage simply not worth the walk - just ask David Cameron. From pig’s heads to pyramids of naked would-be...

Student art: only for the privileged few?

Whether you love it, hate it, or love to hate it, it is undeniable that the student art scene remains a fundamental space for...

Friday Favourite: Revolutionary Road

If I were to tell you that this novel is great because it’s ‘mesmerising’ and ‘powerful’ and ‘you simply can’t put it down’, you...

Wild Flowers

Join me as I walk past the best of gardensIts tulips nod my wayBut their colours filter through my sunglassesAnd don’t quite hit me...

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