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 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.

Between March 2025 and October 2026, I visited all 22 Bodleian libraries, from the reading rooms of central Oxford to the obscure medical libraries.

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?