The jubilance in George Abaraonye’s demeanour matched my memory of our first encounter, coincidentally placed at the location where his university career may be defined: the Oxford Union. I first met the student – who has subsequently become a polarising figure among the politically conservative and a victim of online racial persecution approximately a year prior – at the Oxford African and Caribbean Society (ACS) meeting, Say It With Your Chest.

At a time when Britain feels more polarised than ever, Duyrat’s creed offers a guiding hand to a kinder, more empathetic way of engaging with material culture, art, and the world more broadly.

Fifty or a hundred years ago, it was in book reviewing and literary journalism that the great journalists were to be discovered.

The ocean crossings were extraordinary, but they were never really the destination.

Coming to university, I realised that the stable, effortless reliability of my friends from home was, all of a sudden, precarious and difficult to maintain.

If there were a smell I could capture, bottle up, and treasure forever, it would be the toasty and heartening smell of cacao roasting in the morning.

You may not know the name, but you have almost certainly eaten the pastry. Does the bakery behind Oxford’s favourite cafés hold its own at the counter?

We’ve come to think of boredom as an inevitable but unpleasant gap between activities, or as space to fill, but we’ve stopped seeing that space as worthwhile in itself.