Friday 25th July 2025
Blog Page 1451

Novice pentathletes put on a good show

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For one group of Oxford sportsmen and women Saturday was a weekend of new experiences; a first trip beyond the Oxford ring road since the start of term, a first experience of Cambridge nightlife and, most importantly, the first taste of competitive sport.

After just four weeks to familiarise themselves with modern pentathlon, on the 9th November thirteen novice pentathletes headed down to Cambridge for their first ever competition. Without the riding element, the competition involved fencing all the other athletes, a 3km run, a 200m swim and finally pistol shooting, testing newly-learned skills and accuracy as well as fitness. Determined not to be put off by the strangeness of the sport, the athletes threw themselves into all the disciplines and despite the overall results not going Oxford’s way, there were plenty of positives to be taken from the experience.

The morning started off well with particularly strong fencing performances from the men’s team who were leading by twenty points after this phase. Things were still looking tight at the halfway stage, with the men’s and women’s teams separated by just thirty points and onepoint respectively, thanks to some strong runs by the likes of Chris Cronkite and Tom Outram. There were further strong individual efforts in the swimming, with Katie Treadwell winning the women’s heats and James Goetz coming second in the men’s. Unfortunately Cambridge dominated the final shooting event, meaning that when the final scores came in, the women were narrowly beaten by 2749 points to 2313 and the men even more closely by 2980 to 2690.

Despite the obvious disappointment, the competition was a promising show of new talent. For many it was a first taste of fencing and shooting. The teams certainly enjoyed their first taste of modern pentathlon, and Cambridge nightlife.

 

Boxing update

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On Friday of 6th Week, four Oxford pugilists will be boxing for the university in the first bouts of this season at the Oxford Boxing Academy’s show, held at the Kassam Stadium. OUABC will be represented by Richard Beck (Somerville), Heman Joshi (St Edmund Hall), Men’s Captain Iain Holland (St Benet’s) and President Jack Straker (Queen’s). The bouts have been well-matched, and it is a valuable opportunity to box early in the OUABC season; all four boxers have been putting in the hours inside and outside of the gym, and look forward to a great evening’s sport.

Anyone wanting to come the 6th Week boxing show to offer support is encouraged to go along – with a three-course dinner, followed by boxing matches in various weight categories. Billed by the organisers as “Oxfordshire’s finest boxers fighting top class boxers from all over the UK”, this promises to be a hugely entertaining night. Tickets are £40 per head, and £55 per head for ring-side (tables of ten available only). If you would like to come, even if you do not necessarily have a table planned, get in touch with [email protected].

OUABC is looking in very good shape this season: its membership continues to grow as people get ‘hooked’ (excuse the pun) and keep coming back for more; the pool of those with some boxing experience is larger than ever; the coaches have said that they have never before seen a squad this strong at the start of the season. That goes for men’s boxing as well as women’s boxing, which is in an excellent state. The core squad is training hard together, and everyone has been focused on augmenting their fitness in anticipation of the Town vs. Gown match which is on the horizon: Wednesday in 3rd Week of Hilary, at the Oxford Union. OUABC will be ‘taking on the town’ in what will, as usual, be one of the highlights of the Oxford calendar. 

Rugby League team beginning to sparkle

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Wednesday 6th November saw the mighty Oxford University Rugby League Blues continue their battle in the top flight of the student game after a well-earned promotion last season. A light drizzle adorned the pitch and mud squelched underfoot as Oxford and Northampton ran out to meet each-other in battle.

The opening exchange saw Oxford establish their dominance with Jack Barber swooping in for a try in the first ten minutes and Joe Davies successfully adding a conversion. Northampton were, however, the next to score as mistakes entered into Oxford’s game, with two knock-ons occurring in the space of ten minutes and several repeat sets being gifted to the opposition. Responding to the rallying cries of captain J. Baker as well as the vocal sideline contingent, Oxford turned the next fifty five minutes of play strongly to their advantage. Hard running from Gareth Davies down the middle helped create space outside for Joe Davies to score a brace of tries before halftime, leaving the score at 14-4 to Oxford at the break. Yoni Dennis carried the ball like a mighty ox on several occasions, with one notable instance seeing him advance twenty-five metres, scattering Northampton players like bowling pins.

The second half saw a further four unanswered tries for Oxford bring the score to 324. Oxford’s defence was aggressive, with hard tackles made by the forwards. Prop Ted Stone forced a knock on and Yoni Denis continued to impress in defence, allowing the backs to capitalise on the positioning and possession the forwards managed to secure. Returning Blue Ross Williamson ran the ball hard and fast, earning substantial ground for Oxford, whilst pivot Jack Baker marshalled the backline like a Roman general.

Towards the middle of the half the game became completely dominated by Oxford, with the team gaining 75 metres in three tackles at one point as the difference in fitness began to tell. Northampton failed to track back to support team-mates when the ball was kicked and a large prop received a ball to the face from his hooker to shouts of “You would have caught that if it was a cake” from the sideline.

Oxford still have much to improve on, as mistakes crept back into their game in the last fifteen minutes with Ben Claxton letting a kick drop right through the breadbasket and horribly slicing one of his own out on the full into row Z. Northampton took advantage of this and scored two late tries. One of them was created by their dreadlocked second row who streaked down the sideline, hair trailing behind him like a majestic mane, leaving the final score at 32-12. In all it was a successful day for Oxford with much for the team to be proud of.

After the game, Blues captain Jack Baker, euphoric in victory, quipped, “I am happy. It was good” whilst Leonard Bentley remarked “My calves are looking deadly.” Next week sees Oxford take on Nottingham Trent away, a game which the Blues will be looking to win after a stalwart performance against Northampton.

 

Fencing team get the point(s)

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Business as usual this Michaelmas term at the Oxford University Fencing Club (OUFC), with the anticipated jumble of old and new faces turning up Monday and Thursday evenings (and, so I’m told, unpleasantly early on Wednesday morning) to cram themselves into the Iffley cricket schools.

Anyone who has ever made a foray into the depths of Iffley will be familiar with the perilous trek to this destination: dodging the climbers hanging onto the narrow corridor, and avoiding the sprinters on the track to reach the Siberian outpost that is the cricket, shooting and fencing building. This noisy room, crowded with sweaty flailing fencers, would be eerily reminiscent of OUFC trips to Park End, if not for the greater likelihood of physical injury in the nightclub.

Things are gearing up for the main event of term, the first round of the BUCS fencing competition, at the end of fifth week. As always Oxford has a strong team – one of the few advantages of fencing’s private school bias – but faces competition for its spot at the top of the league from several London-based fronts, as well as the ancient enemy : the light blue-wearing, fen-dwelling Cambridge team. Varsity takes place in Hilary term, but BUCS competitions always provide a good chance to scope out the opposition, cueing involved discussions at the pub ofstrategies and tactics, before the arduous cycle back into town.

And no, I don’t think “arduous” is an overstatement; if anything it doesn’t quite do justice the Odyssey that is my bi-weekly cycle from Iffley to Worcester college.

UCL, as it turns out, now boasts a national foil champion, and Imperial has its share of more-than-competent fencers too, so things are looking interesting for the next few weeks. As a warm up for tough times ahead, we fenced a friendly against Trinity College Dublin last weekend. Clad in red and black socks, Trinity’s fencers made an imposing appearance, but were no match for an on-form home team.

If Ireland is the Persia of Britain, then Oxford is the Spartan contingent from 300. In all respects apart from appearance, number and propensity for inspiring speeches.

Trinity College also brought a novice squad to compete with ours; as with every year, a huge influx of enthusiastic novices have joined the club, who also get a chance to compete in various events, in particular Varsity. The coming term is key for the sporting success of the club as it gears up for said annual event against Cambridge which it has lost for two years running. This year is Oxford’s turn to host, with the Exam Schools providing the lavish and appropriately themed setting (think large paintings of 17th century academics for whom fencing was probably not a sport but a means of self defence). The battle frenzy tends to build slowly through the year, up to the familiar pre-match chants of “shoe the tabs” in Hilary and the always tense contest, which often comes down to a few points, and a whole lot of yelling.

Despite all the fencing yet to be fenced, OUFC is nevertheless planning to make its regular mid-term outing to Park End, with fencers kept under the watchful eye of the team captains.

Review: Lady Gaga- ARTPOP

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★★☆☆☆ Two Stars

To the many who are aware of the ‘meat dress’ incident, the fact that Lady Gaga’s new album ARTPOP is a bit weird will probably not come as a shock. For the most part, these fifteen tracks are in much the same vein as her previous albums – simple, pop-dance tunes, with a couple of curveballs thrown in for good measure. But Gaga seems to push things to the extreme in Artpop, and not in a good way.

Perhaps most noticeable is the smack-you-round-the-face sexualisation of a lot of the tracks. Lady Gaga has always embraced her body and sexuality, and has never shied away from this in her lyrics, music videos and clothing. But some of the songs on ARTPOP take it to the extreme.

‘Sexxx Dreams’, for example, proudly announces ‘When I lay in bed I touch myself and think of you’, whilst G.U.Y. (standing for Girl Under You) sets itself up almost as a musical karma-sutra, inviting the listener to ‘Lay back, and feast as this audio guides you through new and exciting positions’.

Sadly, even shameless sex lyrics are not enough to mask the fact that the music on this album is mediocre at best. The pounding beats and synth sounds we might expect are there, but despite there being fifteen tracks, Gaga does not seem to have managed to create one sing-a-long hit – what this album seriously lacks is a ‘Born This Way’, a ‘Pokerface’ or a ‘Just Dance’.

As on previous albums there is also the token slow song, manifested here as the track ‘Dope.’ This is perhaps the redeeming feature of the album – the lyrics are interesting, the melody is rousing, and she sings it like she actually means it. However, compared to similar songs on other albums, notably ‘Brown Eyes’ and ‘Speechless’, it just does not quite hit the mark.

If you want some generic pop to listen to whilst getting ready for a night out, then ARTPOP might be the album for you. Other than that, the tracks on this album lack the catchy tunes and memorability of her previous releases, definitely leaving something to be desired.

Interview: Marvellous Medicine

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Last Thursday, the Isis gig night at Cellar did what it always does, and pulled in the biggest names Oxford’s music scene. Dot’s Funk Odyssey, Garfunkel and headliners Marvellous Medicine were the three top names, and while my friends queued for me I had a few words with Marvellous Medicine – or at least as many members of Marvellous Medicine as would stay in place at one time. The band were buzzing before their set, and not only was it nigh-on impossible to keep them on topic, but it was pretty hard to hear what they were saying, as Cornmarket was packed with Oxford Uni’s koolest kidz.

Jamie, the guitarist, is very laissez-faire about the whole band, sarcastically claiming to be “very serious about music”, telling me all about their time at Truck Festival when they got back to their campsite and their tent was gone (“We would have been so angry if we hadn’t been completely fucked”) and mocking bandmate George for describing their music as “innocuous”. George and his love for Roald Dahl is the reason for the name, and he founded the band with Rob, who, as they quickly realized, “was quite keen on reggae”. The band only truly formed when more musicians including drummer Holly arrived at the university.

Marvellous Medicine have clearly done their research on inspiration Roald Dahl, telling me all about how “he had his nose cut off the first time he drove a car” (“it was pretty gnarly man,” remarks Jamie), and was blind for six months during the Second World War.
Musically, George tells us that the band is keen to “pull together as many diverse genres as we can”, and this is evident during their show – they play a couple of songs from their upcoming EP which sound more like folk than the ska reggae which they usually produce. The EP is as yet unnamed, though George and Jamie are delighted when I suggest ‘Patronus’ as the name, as they’ve just been telling me what their Patronuses they would be.

Jamie explains the natural gap between “Brookes bands, town bands and uni bands”, and George announces that they’re “trying to bridge that gap” with a gig they’re doing soon with “a massive Brookes band”. The genres explored by bands at Isis’s night are far from ordinary, spanning funk, rock, soul and reggae, and Jamie thinks this is because of the pedigree of Oxford music students, who know so much about different genres. This knowledge isevident as soon as Garfunkel take to the stage, and the crowd love it.

Apparently the band’s biggest wish for the future involves “getting more on our riders”. They’ve not thought too far ahead, but with the new EP coming out, and the fact that half the band have finished university not damaging their output, there is clearly more to come from Marvellous Medicine.

Review: Autobiography by Morrissey

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Heaven knows he’s miserable, and so am I after reading this. Reader, I hurled. W H Auden said that “The interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.” This is the perfect epigraph for Morrissey’s sprawling and broken “autobiography”.

This is a bad book. This does not mean it is an uninteresting book, or even a badly written book. It is simply the result of a great artist let free to be his most overindulgent, insipid and childish. Penguin will come to thoroughly regret giving the imprimatur of its classic series.

The Morrissey that is revealed in Autobiography is a thoroughly unpleasant person, for whom the normal trials and tribulations of life are soul lashing experiences worthy. Of his rejection of a job at a local post office, he tells us he felt “now the only thing left for me was death.” In an attempt at morbid irony, he refers to working as a clerk for the Inland Revenue Department as a “fate worse than life.”

The ultimate moment of hubris comes when he has the chutzpah to seriously compare losing a royalties dispute with two of his former band members to the persecution by the British justice system that Oscar Wilde faced in his trial for homosexuality (the judge, in both cases being simply jealous of their great genius).

One of the most embarrassing aspects of his autobiography is his absurd Peter Pan complex; he wishes to forever play the role of the tortured alienated youth. His words are eternally adolescent and they sound juvenile and embarrassing, coming from a man in his mid 50’s (Morrissey is 54 as of Autobiography’s publication).

This is decisively not an autobiography. It is Morrissey churning words for 500 pages about whichever topics he would like to address; the reader’s interests remain a distracting sidenote. There is almost nothing for instance on the actual process of creating his immortal songs, or of the reasons for the breakup of the Smiths, or anything substantial on his social and political opinions.

Despite his famous “outspokenness” he is unusually reticent on most things that fans would wish to know about. He has a complete inability to put himself or the events in his life in perspective. Does he genuinely believe that even the most die-hard fan cares about the fact that the Smiths name was obscured by the artwork (this, predictably made him feel like he wanted to die)?

There is much introspection, but a complete inability to be self-deprecating. Morrissey was a bitter, angry young genius. Now that he is near 54, he is simply a bitter, angry old man.

Autobiography is published by Penguin Classics and is available here.

Review: Actors’ Anonymous by James Franco

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Kingsley amis stopped reading his son’s chef d’oeuvre Money when the character Martin Amis appeared. If that is how you react towards unconventional narrator/author relationships in novels, then James Franco’s debut novel Actors’ Anonymous might not be for you.

Luckily for reviewers, Franco uses a professor character in the book to voice criticisms of Franco’s own technique: “Stop writing. You don’t have the facility for it. You have the love, but not the skill. As I have said, innumerable times, you throw in a lot of flash, to hide a lack of substance. I think this comes from your deep fear that readers won’t accept you as an actor and a writer.” If this seems witty and self-aware, his use of (valuable) pages of his debut novel to defend himself about the time he was caught sleeping in a lecture seems less so. For those interested 1) It was an optional lecture in the evening and 2) he is a busy man.

James franco’s dubious claim that the book is indeed a novel, supported by the subtitle, “A Novel”, takes shape in two ways. One of these is a schematic where each chapter is meant to illustrate a different stage of an invented actors anonymous therapy program. Franco has fun here and some stages are indeed quite amusing.

The other technique, where characters and narrators overlap across the mostly unconnected short stories, is where his “craft” presumably comes in. Other avant-garde “novels” have had less cohesion, but then they didn’t follow on a collection of short stories. Franco does, however, hone in several disconnected chapters his own unique style, where he writes sentence after sentence of half aphorisms or lone nouns with paragraph breaks between them. No need to quote too liberally but “Facebook. I think it’s nice to have a mix of everything. Some critical writing is better than fiction. Most critical writing is better than fiction. Twitter. Google. Instagram.”, with each line being part of a separate paragraph, is a representative example.

The novel’s plot is fleshed out with the description of several actors and their unfulfilling lives, often spiced with tales of semi-autobiographical love affairs. At one point there is a (fictional?) text message conversation between him and a fan/lover. There is also a series of excruciating poems which Franco addresses to River Phoenix. In the last poem “James, it’s River”, River Phoenix (as interpreted by the poet James Franco) writes a poem back. He’s aware that most of this is trite and embarrassing, which at first seems to justify it. But we call most people who are aware that they are doing something badly, and keep doing it badly nonetheless, stupid. And the self-reflection doesn’t quite mask or distract from the crap see-through characters (real as they may well be) nor the lack of anything that would make this an artwork like those he so often takes time out to praise.

 
Franco ends up being less the ironic actor who dressed as Justin Bieber and danced with Ashley Benson to Selena Gomez’s “Love you like a love song”, clearly having a joke at our expense, and reveals himself to in fact be the embarrassingly earnest grad who praises his hero Salinger in Vice.
 
Actors’ Anonymous is published by Faber and Faber and (if you really want to spend money on 304 pages of cringingly terrible fiction) is available here. 

 

Interview: Albert Alla

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Debut novelists are rarely this well-travelled. Albert Alla, who has just published his first novel Black Chalk, has lived everywhere from St Tropez to Sydney, England to France, finally settling on the Pacific Island of New Caledonia.

Yet it’s Oxford that provides the setting for his first book. Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Brown’s Hate List, Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, the story centres on Nate, a 17-year-old who finds that his friend has committed a school shooting. The focus, however, is less on the perpetator than on the effects of the killing on Nate. I ask Alla why he chose to concentrate on the character of the friend, and not the shooter.

He tells me that a teenage shooter is relatively unintresting. “What you have with a shooter is someone who is highly bullied, and the way you would make such a book interesting is by taking an anti-moral stance; you would do something like American Psycho. To make that work you would have to aim for sympathy or empathy towards horror. In books like Ameri- can Psycho, or certain TV shows, there is an anti-hero glamour that I didn’t want. Shows like Dexter or The Wire have some horrible characters, and we develop a lot of sympathy for these characters, even though their actions are des- picable.”

Instead, Black Chalk is a book about moral ambivalence. Alla tells me that this has been a lifelong obsession. “When we were growing up, and watching a movie, my father would say ‘The contrasts are tuned in too strongly’. The standard American movie has a baddie and goodie. This concept was something that was always looked on distastefully in my household. We looked for something greyer.”

But, I argue, Dexter or The Wire are centred in moral ambivalence. You want to reject those characters’ actions, and yet you’re still interested. Alla disagrees.

“The actions in those shows are still clearly wrong. Moral ambivalence exists there because the author is willing to let you understand the characters. It’s important to understand how someone sees themselves. But it is still not morally ambivalent.” In his book, Nate must remain friends with everyone, including both the victims and perpetrator of the shooting, and there is an uneasy sense of complicity in that friendship.

For someone who has evidently had such a global existence, from writing in Paris to ‘running a small telecommunications firm on an island of two thousand people and twice as many pigs’, it is interesting that he chose Oxford as the setting for his story. Alla studied here as an undergraduate and tells me, “It’s a place that grips you and it takes time before it lets go. When I wrote the book I was still in its grip. I’m not anymore, and it’s strange – when I come back I feel like a stranger.” (The TSK where we meet, for example, was, according to Alla, formerly a QI themed cafe. The more you know.) Though he started off doing Engineering and soon switched to Economics, the only thing he enjoyed was writing. “Most teenage books are really bad, and we try to hide them. But I sweated so much over it that after Oxford, there wasn’t much else I was good at. The only thing I had was writing.”

Alla is currently based in New Caledonia, another island in the Pacific, and the setting for his next book. “It’s a captivating place because it went through an independence struggle but stayed part of France simply because there was a majority of people that wanted to remain. But this was on the wave of massive decolonisation. So now it has 40 per cent who are Caracs and favour independence, 40 per cent of Europeans who are mainly against, and the remainder who are Pacific islanders who are against inde- pendence, fearing that if that happened they would get kicked out. The place is fascinating and the dynamics are fascinating. It’s the sort of place you would imagine Graham Greene setting a novel.”

Before we meet, Alla’s publicist sent me the press release for his novel, which emphasises that its themes are ‘current’. Alla isn’t sure about this description. “When does a book about a shooting become relevant? School shootings are relevant, but so are many things. But we haven’t yet become numb about them. What’s interesting about school shootings is that, in our lives, we’ve seen them become a social phenomenon. You can be certain that angry kids are considering it as we speak. But so many things are ‘current’ – to be current is to be cheap.”

Black Chalk is published by Garne Publishing and available here

Interview: Jim Crace

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Jim Crace’s hypnotic prose and passionately gentle political agenda has fascinated me ever since I read The Pesthouse – a vivid tale of post-apocalyptic America – when I was thirteen, and went to hear him speak afterwards at a book-signing, where I plucked up all my courage to stutter out a slightly nonsensical question.

He made my day by dedicating my copy of the novel to the girl with ‘the smartest question in Cambridge’ – I hope I don’t disappoint him six years down the line. 

 ‘It was June 1963, I was seventeen, and I guessed correctly I’d done badly in my A levels. I reckoned I could be like Jack Kerouac.’ Crace is explaining how he ended up taking what we students might nowadays call a ‘gap year’.

‘I’d wear a lumberjack shirt, smoke a lot of dope, knock out three weeks of “continuous bop prosody” and become a famous novelist before the summer was over. It didn’t happen.’ Instead, Crace returned to England, where he studied English Literature in Birmingham and ‘loved it.’

But the best-selling novels, Whitbread Awards and Man Booker shortlists were still many years away. Jim Crace has always been a stalwart socialist, and wanted to shake up the status quo. He worked for the VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) in Sudan and became a freelance journalist which he counts as ‘more important than fiction’. I ask him to explain.

‘When I spot people reading one of my novels, I can pretty accurately predict how they vote, what newspaper they read and how they feel about red meat. They are all versions of me. So what’s the point of preaching to them? They’re already on my side. But when I was a journalist, my articles would be seen by more than a million people every Sunday. Few of them were clones of me. Good journalism can make converts.’ So what should a young activist do to make a difference? ‘Take to the streets and not to the word processor… I want that to be true even if it isn’t.’

Journalism was also ‘a lot more fun – it dangled me from a helicopter over the Atlantic; it took me running with Daley Thompson; it lost me in the desert several times; it put me in the Ritz with a Bond Girl; it had me tip-toeing through land-mines in remote Cambodia… Plus, it taught me how to make every word count.’

There would have to be a really good reason to quit, and there was – a sinister dispute with the Sunday Times. ‘In 1986 I had a long story spiked for what the gossip columns called “quasi-political reasons” by the then-editor. It concerned the Broadwater Farm riots where PC Blakelock had been murdered the year before. I dug up some uncomfortable details about any number of prejudices.

My discoveries were subsequently vindicated – but too late to save the article (and too late to block the prejudices of the editor). As it happens, the spiking coincided with the sale in America of my first book, Continent. I could afford to be principled, so I left journalism.’

 Crace’s novels retain his political convictions, albeit tacitly. Take his second book, The Gift of Stones, a political allegory for Thatcherite Britain but set in the Stone Age. I wonder if Crace’s latest novel, Harvest (shortlisted for the Man Booker and currently up for the Goldsmiths Award), is political too?

‘Yes, but subtly, hesitantly, furtively so. The message of the book is all smoke and mirrors. It’s not a placard or a slogan or a leaflet, though its subject matters – dispossession, xenophobia – would readily lead themselves to some sloganeering.’

 The riveting novel revolves around an isolated village of farmers in medieval England, forced from their land to make way for sheep. The protagonist of Harvest shares Crace’s fascination with nature – I wonder if he is similar to him in any other ways.

‘None of the characters in my novels are self-portraits. My narrator, Walter Thirsk, is an uneducated man with great sensibilities and an ability to express himself well. Critics have said such a man could not display such narrative gifts. These are the same people who say a glove maker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon with “small Latin and less Greek” could not have written the Shakespeare plays. It’s a class judgement and it’s snobbery. I used Walter to contest that attitude.’

I ask if Crace thinks Oxford should do more to contest the state/private school imbalance. ‘Personally, I’d like every fee-paying and selective school in the country to close because no-one any longer saw any benefit in them.’ Crace was opposed to the Man Booker opening its doors to American novelists, worrying the prize would lose its Commonwealth ‘focus’. So is an institution like Oxford valuable in upholding British tradition, or archaic?

‘Oxford University is certainly archaic. The past is replayed there every day. Traditions are rehearsed and upheld. But ruling class traditions aren’t the only ones in Britain. Ask yourself the question, is an institution like Oxford University valuable in upholding immigrant tradition, or working class tradition, or Northern tradition, or Socialist tradition, or (add to the list yourself) tradition – and the answer is clearly No. That is not a condemnation of OU (or not entirely); it is merely what you see reflected if you hold up a mirror to the place.’

My final question to Crace is why he has decided Harvest will be his last novel. His answer is typical of the man who has made time to be interviewed by a persistent fresher during the drama of two major award nominations: ‘Because I’d like to be more useful – for a while, at least.’

Harvest is published by Picador and is available here