It’s safe to say that Stuart Jeffries has a complicated relationship with the University of Oxford. He is now a freelance arts journalist, writing regularly for The Guardian, Financial Times, Spectator, and Mail on Sunday. Earlier in his career, he also wrote as a jazz critic for the communist...

The year Naomi Lightman came to study at Oxford – 1962 – was the first in which women were allowed to become members of the Oxford Union. Four years earlier, the five women’s colleges had finally been granted equal status with the men’s colleges.

Long before he became one of Israel's ‘new historians’, Avi Shlaim was a boy in Israel, self-conscious about the sound of his first language. Years earlier, that same boy had been growing up in Baghdad, a city that had been home to Iraqi Jews for two millennia, in a...

Peter Beinart knows the importance of admitting when you’re wrong. A professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York, a New York Times columnist, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, he has spent the last three decades as a leading liberal voice in the United States. But, unlike other pundits who pin their flags to the mast in order to pay the bills, Beinart’s writing is characterised by subtlety, self-reflection, and a remarkable political transformation.

The question, perhaps, is not whether Oxford makes time for tradition, but which traditions have the privilege of being considered part of ordinary life.

My home village, in the quiet countryside of Cheshire, has a population of 200. Within walking distance, you'll find a church, a pub, and an upscale coffee shop.

I am, resoundingly, not a morning person. The precise moment at which my alarm clock begins to beep is, without fail, the worst of my day.

There is the college self, who you become when you queue for the dining hall, do your laundry, and collect parcels from the porter’s lodge.