‘Old English was not useful. It was entertaining though, in a morbid sort of way. Vocational degrees are of limited use anyway. We are human beings, not machines. It doesn’t matter what you study as long as your mind starts to work. I can’t help thinking that the zombie craze is because we educate people to be as dead as possible while still alive.

Working class students need people like me to talk to them and to go into their schools. Oxford could do a lot better with its time and money if it asked those of us who understand the problem first hand to get involved. Also, there is no point pretending that when students from difficult or disadvantaged back-grounds arrive at Oxford, they will just fit in.

The first term is crucial and help should be there. Oxford’s breakdown and suicide rate is shameful. Many more students suffer terrible personal difficulties – and these difficulties are compounded if you feel like you are ‘wrong’ in some fundamental way. Whenever I couldn’t cope, my horrible tutor asked me if I would be more comfortable at Aberystwyth.

I help to pay for my godchildren to attend private schools – one is at City of London, the other at Westminster. I see what a good school does for a child. They love school and they are confident, happy girls. How different for a child from some dump up north, like me.

It is good that Michael Moritz has given £300 million to Oxford for scholarships for poor students . Let’s not waste that money, but let’s not pretend that Oxford is for everyone; it isn’t.

Oxford is not and never will be an equal environment. Life is not an equal environment. What we have to do is address real problems of education and achievement and access lower down the food chain in the school system.

Catz was genuinely mixed and pretty democratic, but on my first day my tutor turned to me and said, “You are the working class experiment.” Then he turned to the young woman who was to become, and has remained, my closest friend, and he said, “You are the black experiment.” That is why I help to put her girls, my godchildren, through private school.

Interestingly, I wrote about this in the Catz Yearbook just recently, and they refused to print it. It is a long time since I have had an article rejected.

Our tutor was a dreadful man; refused to teach girls because of his malevolent homosexuality and made the lives of the boys quite a challenge. I am glad to say that he is dead.

On Feminism and female characters

We have to keep reinventing the wheel. When I studied English we were told that there were only four women novelists worth reading: the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf was not taught. When I was a kid in Accrington, I more or less taught myself by going into the library and making my way along the shelves of English Literature A-Z. This story is in Why be Happy? I did notice that most of the books were written by men, but it wasn’t until I got to N that I felt let down: Nabokov. I wondered why he hated the mature female body so much, why he was so vile about women. It does matter – style or no style.

I write for everyone. Women do write for everyone, but there is still an assumption that only men write for everyone. You will have noticed that men don’t really read women if they can get away with not doing so.

I write strong women characters. Of course I do. I want to challenge every status quo. There is no point being a writer if you are not prepared to take risks. I believe that literature makes us better human beings – and that being able to read deeply is itself a challenge to sound bite culture and the three-minute attention span.

As a writer, I am not here to make things easier; I am here to fight back. I believe in the political and moral purpose of art. This isn’t about propaganda – it’s about what it means to be human, the societies we try to create, the life of the mind, the primacy of imagination, the refusal of money and power as dominant values. The refusal of patriarchy as a natural or normal template for social organisation.

Everything about society is propositional. The way we organise ourselves is actually a choice, not a law like gravity. This is worth remembering most mornings.

My own characters? The Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry – first woman in literature to make filth into a fashion accessory. Villanelle, the cross-dressing croupier in The Passion. And myself, of course, because I am a character in my own fiction. How could it be otherwise?

If I could be a woman in someone else’s fiction I’d choose to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. How irresistible to cross time and gender all at once. My friend, the American writer A. M. Homes, prefers to write from a male point of view. I don’t. Sometimes I prefer not to make it clear what the gender of the narrator is. We have so many assumptions about gender. Fiction is one way of challenging those assumptions.

As for feminism being coffined? Are you mad? 50% of women in the Arab world are illiterate. Are we so smug as to think that feminism is about clever girls from Oxford and London? We have more choices, more opportunities, but women do not earn as much as men do, or make it to the boardroom. And look at the Cameron Cabinet.

Childcare should not be the reason for the scarcity of women at higher levels of power and pay. Childcare shouldn’t be a woman’s problem – it is a family issue. A child has a fa- ther as well as a mother. And all of us in the 21st century should be talking about what family means now, what heterosexuality means now, and how we can remake society so that it actually works for families and not against them.

And don’t you want to see an end to body hatred? Why should young women be made to think about their bums, tits, weight, hair, clothes, shoes, ALL the time? The misogyny of advertising needs urgent address. As does the fashion industry. The West’s biggest export right now is body hatred. China is the fastest growing market for plastic surgery – and for women under 30. Is this what we want? Don’t you want to change it? That’s feminism, girls. Caitlin Moran is GREAT. I loved How To Be A Woman.

On Autobiography

Not a useful word. Authenticity is the only word that matters in art. Creative work is a lie detector. There are no shortcuts or cheats. Crazy or sane is not relevant; truth is relevant. The truth of art is complex, always challenging. That is not to say there isn’t delight and humour and pleasure. Creativity isn’t either/ or: it’s everything. The richness and contradiction of life is magnified in art. Above all, art is a place to feel. This isn’t a hiding place; it’s a place of discovery.

I do not believe in false oppositions of imagination versus experience, or experiment versus realism. Maybe that works for critics and academics, but creativity is not about binaries. This is the work of your soul – and if that is an old-fashioned word, too bad.

Anyway, Why be Happy isn’t an autobiography. It isn’t a memoir either. It is an experiment with experience.

So I wrote Oranges when I was 25 and Why be Happy when I was 52. Maybe I like inverting numbers.

On The Daylight Gate

This was a bit of a dare in that it was suggested to me by Simon Oakes who owns the Hammer outfit and who decided to augment the sexy movie part of the empire with a sober sister (not much money) and revitalise the Hammer imprint. Random House agreed to publish these new novellas. Simon suggested I write something about the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, because I was brought up in the shadow of Pendle Hill. I thought, ‘Why not?’ I am high- minded but not precious.

I am interested in genre writing. No, I am interested in everything – what is life for, otherwise? So I decided to give it a go. And writing a page-turner is hard work. I am not plot- driven, so this was a specific challenge. I think it worked.

What next?

Well, with reservations, trepidation, excitement, and interest I am taking over from Martin Amis and Colm Toibin and going to Manchester as Professor of Creative Writing for a couple of years.

It isn’t an everyday job by any means. I will teach once a week for one term a year and put on a few events and be an ambassador for the course. Let’s see how it works out. I have only signed for two years. And I am starting a new book and getting heavily involved in new digital platforms. Follow me on Twitter@ Wintersonworld and check out my website jeanettewinterson.com’

Converge are an enigma. In a hardcore scene dominated by a DIY mentality that results in a maximum of two albums, a number of fans which – if you’re lucky – finds its way into triple figures, and an ultimate legacy consisting of a dozen frayed t-shirts on ebay, the band has managed to make ferocious and kinetic bursts of noise for the last twenty-two years. All We Love We Leave Behind proves, to use a cliche which suits the band’s music, that Converge show absolutely no signs of slowing down.

Don’t let the stereotypically emo title fool you. This is an album which would most likely turn your average thirteen-year-old Fall Out Boy fan into a quivering wreck thirty seconds into blistering opener, ‘Aimless Arrow’. No jock-masquerading-as-geek tween angst here. This album was made for one purpose only: to kick the shit out of you. That is not to say that the four self-proclaimed “hardcore kids using leftover Slayer riffs” are not musically adept. Tracks such as ‘Shame in the Way’ show a mastery of technical guitar work and fascinatingly weird time signatures that King Kerry and co. could only dream of.

‘Veins and Veils’ sees Jacob Bannon’s Poe-esque lyrical prowess reach dizzy new heights, and the treble-heavy thrash riffs and crushing beatdowns of ‘Sadness Comes Home’ and ‘Empty on the Inside’ display the level to which Converge reconcile their two principle influences of punk and metal in order to create a visceral and exciting sound.

All We Love We Leave Behind may not be the most accessible album and is possibly not the best place to start for those new to heavier genres of music, but it is a dazzling slice of musical ability and creativity which shows that the band’s title as the ‘kings of hardcore’ is as valid now as it has ever been.

FOUR STARS

The beginning of ‘Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1’, opener to Transcendental Youth, sounds unnervingly like the Scissor Sisters’ ‘Take Your Mama’. The gut wrenches. Is this the end? After 18 years and 14 albums, have John Darnielle and his band of not-so-merry-men gone chart-friendly? No, thank gawd, no; a mere ten seconds later, the listener is whisked back to familiarly Mountain-ous terrain. Any fears of the contrary are almost immediately silenced by insights into lead singer Darnielle’s stereotypically obstinate outlook: ‘I hide out in my corner/Because I like my corner’.

Much of The Mountain Goats’ beauty has always stemmed from Darnielle’s lyricism, which, although plainly-sung and succinct is firmly rooted in the conceptual. Tropes of depression, paranoia, rebirth and affirmation find themselves played out through vignettes inhabited by Darnielle’s usual suspects, outcasts, junkies and have-nots – but the poetry here finds itself in more upbeat territory, and bolstered by a stronger emphasis on musicality than has been present in earlier albums. The music adds clout and dynamism to its lyrics, rather than merely acting as a backdrop. Perhaps most notable is the introduction of a horn section, arranged by avant-garde composer Matthew E. White, which helps to connect song and narrative voice and reinforce what few kernels of hope there are to be found in Darnielle’s bleak imagery.

The current single and album highlight ‘Cry for Judas’, sees the added horn section hinting at Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – which can surely only ever be a Good Thing. In short, The Mountain Goats have done it again. Listen to this album, and be safe in the knowledge that, at this rate, there’ll be more soon.

FOUR STARS

Leaping on stage with an acoustic guitar and a gauche stage demeanour, folk troubadour Benjamin Francis Leftwich swiftly launches into the wispy, melodic ‘Pictures’. In a nondescript khaki t-shirt, Leftwich presents an incongruous vision against the imperious beauty of Oxford’s Town Hall, while his reputedly dry sense of humour was pretty much absent as he powered on through ‘1904’ and ‘Shine’ with minimal chat in between.

Which may be just as well, for when it comes it’s hardly side-splitting fare. Of new song ‘Manchester Snow’ Leftwich mumbles “this is a song I wrote about a girl I had intercourse with eleven times”. Yolo and all that.

The delicate poignancy of ‘Butterfly Culture’ with Leftwich’s sparse and ethereal vocals, however, gives some explanation for the cult following he’s clearly amassed. Indeed, the apparent use of a typewriter as a makeshift metronome adds a dash of amusing idiosyncrasy to a performance which hinges on the understated.

Suddenly he orders the crowd to be quiet; his devoted following duly oblige and a pregnant hush settles. Unplugging his guitar and stepping away from the microphone with a self-conscious sense of ceremony, he delivers a rendition of ‘Maps’ devoid of band backing or microphones. Because he’s, like, a bona fide, none-of-this-fake-shit, singer-songwriter. OK? Huskily crooning “I named a star after you/ But that wasn’t bright enough for you” the audience’s rapt adoration belies the fact that Leftwich’s rasping voice sounds like a healthy dose of Lemsip and singing lessons would go a long way in improving this performance.

A forgettable and rather half-baked cover of Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ further underlies how Leftwich would benefit from greater musical complexity; his stripped-back acoustic approach is humble, but a tad repetitive and certainly rather limiting at times. So while there is much to commend in the Yorkshire singer-songwriter’s evening of mellow, chilled-out folky music, the scope for refinement is significant.

The current neo-folk music climate may be teeming, but as Leftwich’s performance shows, in the wrong hands this brand of singer-songwriting can easily descend into mediocrity, banality and abject boredom.

Silence in the library, please. No eating, no loud noises and, god forbid, no talking. I venture into the one library in Oxford not frequented by students – Oxford Cen­tral Library. It has a character all of its own – none of the rustling parch­ment and quiet keyboard tapping of academic reading, but instead the hustle and bustle of a public library. And as I took my seat I was advised by the kindly librarian of the strong body odour of a nearby reader, sug­gesting that I may want to move the table safely out of smell’s way. Some­what nervously, I placed some head­phones over my ears and the iPod track began to play.

The Quiet Volume is a performance for two. It’s intimate, it’s exposing, and it’s almost unnervingly fascinat­ing. Sitting side-by-side, you listen to a tape synchronised with your part­ner’s and follow the instructions of disembodied whispers as library life unfolds.

The tape acts as the narrator to the spectacle, guiding you into narra­tive and out again, stripping down the very process of reading by draw­ing on extracts of four books placed in front of you. You are prompted, perhaps against your will, perhaps not, to perceive library life as an out­sider: to attend to the slightest tap of a finger, a shuffling of papers, the slight dry cough of the man to the right of you.

The extracts themselves and the complimentary vocal script don’t so much as follow a set plotline as they do allude to similar themes and events. That photograph of a Dres­den-esque town, the elderly wom­an’s voice whispers, ‘could easily be the home of the blind and death boys you encountered before,’the ones who ‘see things ever since the bombings’.

A sinister vein runs throughout the script, the constant hopping be­tween fiction and real observation urging you to apply the narrated scenes, and in particular, the idea of sense and senses, to life in the li­brary. And all the while this is hap­pening, we are encouraged to hear and to take note of the cacophony of voices present in the room: from the narrator’s voice, to the librarian’s steady murmur, to our own inner reading voice, to an awareness that everyone in the room has their own reading voice.

This is an interesting piece of ex­perimental drama, but one intended for mass consumption – no student pretension here. It is the case that you really have to invest yourself in this performance, and be willing to look slightly bizarre to those around you. You’re likely to walk out of the library simply thinking ‘what the hell was that?’, maybe in a good way, or maybe not. If you’re looking for a novel way to spend an hour in a library without getting any work done, you could do worse than this.

We always knew he was going to be big, we just didn’t know how big. Known now for the persona he af­fectionately calls his ‘loony alter ego’, it turns out everybody’s fa­vourite Pub Landlord is actually quite a clever chap. Furthermore, in 2007 he was voted 16th great­est stand-up comic on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-Ups.

The well known cheeky chappy is actually far more well-heeled than you might imagine. It’s not beer running through the veins of this Great British pub landlord – oh no he’s quite blue blooded. He’s the great-great-great-great-grandson of a Duke and related to William Thackeray. Not so much village publican, then.

Coming to Oxford in the late 80s to read History, Mr Murray didn’t leave it long before joining the Oxford Revue and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Stew­art Lee, Ben Moor and Richard Herring.

Cherwell always had an inkling that this Cellar regular would make the nation chortle on their cola, and in May 1990 predicted that this really clean-shaven lad was ‘destined for great things.’ Entertaining the student body with his ‘wilfully crappy jokes’, Murray was a man much loved and clasped to the bosoms of many a matriculate. And e still is, for that matter.

But there’s more to this Teddy than his quick repartee. Appear­ing on Hell’s Kitchen, ‘Al’ wowed audiences with his fish pie prow­ess. Showing fans there’s more to the man than a pint of London Pride and a game of pool. All in all, the lad’s a good’un and we’re proud to call him our own.

A piece of new writing, set in Oxford University, based on the social lives of rich and ar­rogant students. From the start, the two characters are tossing off lines about Brideshead, Formal Hall and sixty pound pre-drinks. And just to make sure we know how clever the writer is, there’s a brief interlude of discussion about moral relativism. Five minutes in, and your reviewer is already settling in for another piece of abysmal Oxford drama created by some arts student who thinks they can write.

But bit by bit, it begins to grow on me. Somehow, the rounds of shallow conversation don’t quite become boring. The Oxford setting, the Brideshead characters chatting about cava and cocaine, are so out­landish, yet terrifyingly true to life, that they draw me in. Amber Husain and Frederick Bowerman, as Cordelia and Jack, have an easy chemistry that makes them a continual pleasure to watch. The conversation, despite the pretension and philosophising, is natural, believable, and entertain­ing. It turns out Robert Holtom, the author of Isobel, actually can write.

What’s more, there’s something else going on here – there is an un­dertone of darkness to the facile con­versation, allusions at a lifestyle and attitude that suggests there may be more than meets the eye to this play. And indeed there is – I wouldn’t dare offer any spoilers, but safe to say the opening moments that made my heart sink are not indicative of the whole performance. Indeed, Hol­tom’s script neatly mocks the kind of student drama his work at first appears to be – the characters bitch about a director whose plays are nothing more than philosophy dis­cussions starring her ‘besties’. It’s a subtle nod to the audience, a small meta reference that satirises student drama more effectively than any­thing more overblown could man­age.

The performances of the small cast certainly aren’t perfect – a few moments that director Rachel Forster suggested were meant to elicit sympathy didn’t quite ring true, and became clunky moments best quickly forgotten. However, given I was seeing a second rehearsal, that is entirely forgivable.

In fact, the standard already achieved suggests that, come open­ing night, the three part cast will be simply incredible.

This is a piece of drama that de­fies initial impressions, in way that is almost inspired. So often new writing is a disgrace to the stage it’s performed on, and the BT is no stran­ger to bad plays. But Isobel punches above its weight, and is exactly what new writing should be – small and perfectly formed, grounded in a fa­miliar setting with a dark undertone and a clever plot just sufficient to grip an audience for the required for­ty minutes. Highly recommended.

FOUR STARS

NW is a book that defies encapsulation. It has been called a Bildungsroman, and yet it flirts with mystery, positions itself in intense realism, and occasionally parodies the romance genre. Ostensibly, it is about four Londoners (Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan) who hail from the same fictional Caldwell council estate, trying to establish a life for themselves away from it. But this description can hardly do justice to the cacophony of voices that populate this novel.

Most obviously, this book examines characters whose identities are caught in a mire of clashing cultures. Leah identifies herself as “the only white girl” at work and is herself the daughter of conflicted Irish and British origin. Leah’s best friend, Natalie (aka Keisha) is lambasted for abandoning her roots after she changes her name, trains as a lawyer, and marries a man who himself is “made of parts Natalie considered mutually exclusive” with an “indescribable accent” evoking Caribbean origin and Italian upbringing.

This examination is most impressively rendered in Smith’s dazzling use of dialogue. Language, accent and tone are shown explicitly as what they so frequently are: markers of cultural identity that, known as such, cause bewilderment, and even consternation to the characters themselves. Annie, a down-and-out who hails from old money, has a voice that “worked a spell” and allows her to “fall and fall and fall and still never quite hit the ground,” whilst the successful Natalie, in a moment of poignant self-reflection, notices her slip into the slang of her childhood when she talks to a kid smoking in a park: “She had not ended a sentence in ‘man’ for quite some time.”

If the characters’ linguistic paranoia marks their difficulty in orientating themselves on a personal level, then perhaps as an extension it also reflects their difficulty in angling themselves in relation to others. Leah and Natalie, whose developing relationship is charted in ‘host’, a series of 184 vignettes, move from a state of simplicity in which “they were best friends bonded for life by a dramatic event” to a more fraught relationship as they begin to doubt each other’s choices in life. However, in a move that provides a certain narrative satisfaction, their differences seem at least partially resolved by the ending when they are again united by a shared experience.

Smith’s novel is not simple, and it is not self-sufficient. Rather it throws its questions to the wind and asks the reader to watch the chips settle where they may or spin out of sight though not out of mind. It does not resolve much, but it satisfies, and it is genuinely beautiful. 

I must admit, it was hard not to be a little disappointed when I first viewed the ‘Victorian Avant-Garde’ exhibition. After all, I was promised sex!

Well, not literally (the drive to get more young people into Museums hasn’t yet gone THAT far. Give it time), but if, like me, your knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comes primarily from the legendary tales of their debauched and scandalous lives then, well, the current exhibition at the Tate Britain may feel a little… reserved. Still, this is in keeping with the art itself: it’s often been noted that Pre-Raphaelite art can seem slightly static, and can appear inferior to other works of the time outside the UK. Still, the Tate is rightfully proud of our own home-grown radical art movement, and has gone to great pains to increase awareness of it. After all, who needs all that fancy French stuff anyway?

For any fans of the Brotherhood, most of the classic paintings were there, including Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Christ in the House of his Parents’ and Holman Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat’ and ‘The Hireling Shepherd.’ Nothing beats seeing a piece in the flesh (so to speak), and the Tate have clearly worked hard to pull in works from galleries near and far, leaving them with a pretty formidable selection. It’s so comprehensive, in fact,  that though some paintings are a little less visually arresting than others, it’s hard to be disappointed by the cumulative effect of the exhibition as a whole.

Aside from the more famous paintings (aka, ones that I had heard of) there was a wealth of material from affiliates of the Brotherhood like Ford Madox Ford, and a wide range of art in different mediums. For the most part this was from the textiles work of William Morris and Edward Burne Jones, but for any literary types there were also some examples of illustrated books from the period, including a copy of ‘Goblin Market’ illustrated by Christina Rossetti’s brother Dante (a leading light of the Pre-Raphaelite movement). While I enjoyed these, I did feel they were a little underused; but that’s probably just my English student bias. It was also interesting to see paintings by Lizzie Siddell, the wife of Rossetti and the model for ‘Ophelia.’ An artist in her own right, it was interesting finally to see some of her work, traditionally less exhibited than the more popular paintings that emerged from the movement.

Clearly, there was more to these guys than sex and easels; in fact, there were so many interesting items in the collection that I don’t have space to include them all. Maybe I went to this exhibition for the wrong reasons, but I think I enjoyed it for the right ones. These paintings may not rival contemporary examples from across the pond, but their relevance to our history and our artistic culture shouldn’t be underestimated. And if they can make that impression on a bumbling amateur like me, then the Pre-Raphaelites must have done something right.