Monday 7th July 2025
Blog Page 17

‘My Oxford Year’ release date announced

Meg Howard
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‘My Oxford Year’ release date announced

Netflix has confirmed the release date for the project it filmed in Oxford last year, My Oxford Year. Adapted from Julia Whelan’s book of the same name, the film will be released on 1st August.

My Oxford Year stars Sofia Carson as an American visiting student studying English Literature. Inevitably, Anna’s “Oxford Year” does not follow the familiar rhythm of tutorials, Bridge, and hall dinner – instead, it is interrupted by a passionate fling with her poetry tutor, Jamie Davenport, played by Corey Mylchreest. Mylchreest is no stranger to a Netflix success, having starred as George III in Queen Charlotte; A Bridgerton Story (2023). 

Filming took place in the city centre last September, at a similar time to the University’s open days. As a result, despite avoiding term-time, many students spotted camera crews near the Bridge of Sighs, the Radcliffe Camera, and Magdalen Bridge. 

Scenes were also shot at slightly less orthodox locations. Toby Gawthorne and Amber Masson, both students at Brasenose College, ended up meeting Mylchreest outside Hassan’s. “We sat down on a bench right next to the shot,” Gawthorne told Cherwell, “and that’s when, of all people, Corey came and sat down with his kebab next to us”. He asked them “whether the kebab van in the scene was one people actually went to”. Anyone who has walked down Broad Street after midnight can certainly answer that. According to Masson and Gawthorne, “he, and the rest of the crew… were absolutely lovely.” 

This will be the first major film set in Oxford since Saltburn in 2023. My Oxford Year paints a slightly different picture: as of writing, the official stills released by Netflix seem to promise an Oxford full of improbable meet-cutes, pithy yearning across oak-panelled rooms, and sub-fusc.

Review: Closer – ‘Where Marber fails’

Faye Chang
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Review: Closer – ‘Where Marber fails’

Labyrinth Production’s staging of Patrick Marber’s 1997 play, Closer, was an ambitious move for a student-run production company. Ambitious as it was, the cast themselves put on a strong showing; my major problems with the play stemmed from the original script, rather than their production of it. 

Closer depicts a series of betrayals, affairs, and reunions between two couples: on the one hand, Alice (Catherine Williams-Boyle), a self-proclaimed ‘waif’, and aspiring writer, Dan (Vasco Faria); on the other, rising photographer Anna (Vita Hamilton) and dermatologist Larry (Robert Wolfreys). Their relationships and brutal honesty with each other are ostensibly driven by an obsession with the truth – although to me, it felt far more like an obsession with ownership over the lives and minds of their partners. 

Williams-Boyle embodied the character of Alice confidently, eyes literally glittering in her opening conversation with Dan as he waits with her in the hospital. Hamilton played Anna with an admirable restraint, sometimes lingering on pauses for so long that I worried she had forgotten her lines, a worry only assuaged by the fact that every minutiae of Anna’s thinking was made visible on her face. Faria and Wolfreys both excelled when their characters are at their worst – Larry in his vengeance and sudden anger, Dan at the peak of his pettiness. 

The staging was also artful, with a grid on the floor made out of white tape emphasising the physical and emotional distance between the characters. One particular scene saw four chairs situated at each corner, moving back and forth through time between Anna’s meeting with Larry to insist on him signing their divorce papers, to her reunion with Dan only a few hours later, to reveal that she had had to sleep with Larry in order to get the papers signed. Each pair sat at opposite ends of a diagonal from each other, leaving the audience anxiously waiting for the characters to bridge the space between. 

The one aspect of acting that I remained unconvinced by was the chemistry between Anna and Dan, despite the conflict of the play hinging on their affair. The build-up of tension felt rushed, with their first interaction – Anna taking photos of Dan for his new book, an account of Alice’s life – finishing in a 15-second long makeout by the end of the scene. With little discernible reason for their attraction to each other beyond Dan’s melodramatic declarations that he simply could not live without her, I never found myself fully believing in the passion between the two, nor understanding what it was that drew both Dan and Larry repeatedly back to Anna. 

The ‘searing honesty’ of Marber’s dialogue appeared mainly (and repetitively) in obsessive arguments between the four characters about the sexual intimacies that their cheating was comprised of: questions of “Did he make you come?” and “Was he better than me?” came up again and again, in roughly the same form. After the third or fourth iteration of this conversation, I found myself bored and infuriated by the lack of change in these characters, rather than impressed by the cast’s passionate deliveries. 

It’s plausible that the portrayals could have been improved by demonstrating nuanced shifts between the characters in each version of this argument – nonetheless, the problem belonged firmly to the original script, not the production. Every scene felt like it was delivering similar beats of betrayal, anger, and vengeance, and it was futile to expect something else. 

Marber’s writing was also peppered with out-of-place pseudo-revelations, ranging from “without forgiveness, we’re savages” to “Our flesh is ferocious. Our bodies will kill us. Our bones will outlive us.” These lines were dropped in the script so abruptly that any artful effect is dispelled, seemingly just to reveal some level of great intellect on the part of the writer. This kind of inanity is difficult to redeem, no matter the skill of the actors themselves. 

Another aspect that took away from my immersion was as mundane as the age gap between the actors and the characters they were meant to be playing. This was a point that the cast had already acknowledged in an earlier interview about the play. The director, Rosie Morgan-Males, told Cherwell: “Aside from Catty playing Alice, we’re not that close to the playing age of the characters. So I think in those instances, it’s really important to see how much emotion we can draw from it, rather than creat[ing] a really realistic study of four 20 to 40 year olds.”

The cast of Closer certainly did succeed in doing so. The emotional vicissitudes were particularly pronounced and well-acted in the first half of the play: Anna and Larry’s break-up just before the intermission was one of the stand-out moments of the performance for me, with Wolfreys and Hamilton building up to a mesmerising intensity in the final beat of the scene. 

Use of space built upon the explosive dynamics here skillfully as well. The middle of the studio was initially split along the diagonal, with each couple taking up one half and allowing the audience to flick back and forth between their spitfire arguments. The departure of Alice and Dan from the scene felt like the emotional equivalent of letting a lion out of a circus cage – Anna and Larry encroach into the newly freed space instantly, pacing furiously around the room and chasing each other across the stage. Wolfreys did particularly well here: we got a glimpse of the viciousness and vengeance waiting just under Larry’s skin, to be peeled back and revealed again throughout the second half of the play. 

When such moments of high intensity were counter-balanced with moments of cynical humour and irony (think Dan posed as Anna in an online chatroom, sexting Larry), the play felt strongest. It was unfortunate that Marber’s script failed to lean into this variation, or demonstrate another aspect of the characters that audiences could respond to. Such variation would have also highlighted the abilities of the undeniably skilled cast; what resulted was Marber’s failure, not theirs.

Review: JACK – ‘Gas-lit showstoppers, intrigue, and murder’

Rhys Ponsford
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Review: JACK – ‘Gas-lit showstoppers, intrigue, and murder’

Jack The Ripper is arguably the most famous killer of the Victorian era. There is a fanatical fascination with his case. He is a true crime podcaster’s dream: no confirmed convict, grisly deaths, police incompetence – the list goes on. It is little wonder the myth and mystique of Jack far obscures the reality of his terrible crimes.

Yet The Ripper is not the protagonist of Not a Plot Productions’ musical JACK; playwright Sahar Malaika’s script patently refuses to glorify his killings. While his shadow may loom large over the show, it is his victims who take centre-stage (literally, at points). JACK grants these women a rare opportunity to tell their under-sung story on their own terms.

Indeed, the show acts as an explicit rebuke of the typical narratives attached to Jack The Ripper. Director Rosie Sutton told Cherwell how at “the core of the production… [was the need to] centre the victim. So many narratives about Jack The Ripper are so focused on him and this gruesome murder, but the women are just bodies… they’ve just become objectified.”

It was this ethos that saw both Jack’s victims, and women as a whole, placed “front and centre” – both narratively and onstage. Together, “The Unfortunates”, most of whom were sex workers, form a chorus-like quartet – that of Mary Ann Nichols (Olivia Russell), Annie Chapman (Eleanor Bogie), Elizabeth Stride (Meira Lee), and Catherine Eddowes (Esme Dannatt). Their presence intermittently haunts the stage, emerging onstage at dramatic turning points. The audience are reminded of the very real stakes of the police investigation, as the souls of these women linger still; while The Ripper lives, they cannot rest.

Indeed, The Unfortunates even have physical agency – though employed for metaphorical effect, rather than as actual ghosts. In one case, they physically shunt around the earnest but decidedly flustered Police Constable Alfie Foster (Orla Wyatt). Simultaneously, Mary Kelly, played by an impassioned Nicole Palka, enraged, decries Foster and the police’s “negligence” and “naivete” in handling the case. Mary goes on to proclaim that too many die “for the crime of being a woman”. Indeed, throughout the show, the audience realises the police force’s desperation to solve the murders is driven by a desire to halt the scathing coverage of their investigation by the press. There is little, if any, sympathy displayed for the victims. Such sentiments are embodied in the characterisation of the other police character. Stanley Toyne as the Captain channelled all the uniformed machismo and dispassionate air of authority you would expect from someone of his position.

The show is thus a sharp critique of what Sutton described as “complete inaction” from the police force of the Victorian period. Malaika’s script clearly also denounces the entrenched culture of violence against women of Jack’s London. For instance, Mary’s toxic relationship with the staggering and quick-tempered drunkard John (Henry Nurse) highlights the domestic abuse that was rife at the time. Still, such concerns resonate far beyond the characters’ epoch, in an urgent warning that gender-based violence, misogyny, and femicide are societal plagues that remain with us still.

Staged in the intimate space of St Benet’s Chapel, there was little reprieve from the bleak (though ultimately hopeful) narrative of JACK, as it spirited its audience away to the streets of Victorian London. The ending contained a small but fiery optimism in its reaffirmation of the agency of the women in the narrative.

The cast gave a spirited, if not always flawless, performance during the ensemble sections. JACK’s backing track, pre-recorded and played through speakers at the back of the Chapel was suitably catchy, too, although there were times when I feared the actors were being drowned out by the backing tracks.

The use of the Chapel was creative, given how small the venue was. Characters regularly marched on and fled offstage via the central walkway between the pews. This lent an unexpected but welcome sense of immersion, particularly as the cast prior to the performance had been interacting in-character with the rest of the audience (even Cherwell’s own was at one point approached and asked by one of the Unfortunates if he wanted ‘a good time’!) Props were somewhat sparse but smartly employed.

The attention to detail in the newspapers was especially impressive, replicating the overwhelming walls of text of Victorian periodicals. I do wish more had been made of the red-tape board on Jack, as it was sequestered at the back of the stage – the police/intrigue scenes, in particular, would have been elevated further by its inclusion.

More broadly, the choreography was engaging, with highlights once again being The Unfortunates. For instance, the use of reading aloud newspaper extracts to lead into songs was a clever conceit, with the refrain of ‘Dear Boss!’ (itself an opening to an alleged ‘Ripper’ letter), a catchy hook that ran throughout the play. The final tableaux was particularly striking, with The Unfortunates scattered about onstage abruptly crumpling in a staccato rhythm, amidst a shocking centre-stage set-piece, and another stalwart figure who stood back turned to the audience.

An aspect of the show that was intriguing was the queer romance between Mary and Nell (Sorcha Ní Mheachair). Despite the shorter run time of JACK (roughly an hour), there was still some development in their relationship. It was refreshing to see a narrative centred around women also include queer concerns, given how such experiences can interweave and intersect. It was JACK’s desire to foreground the historically marginalised, and this is something I would argue it achieves.

What I appreciated most about JACK ultimately was its willingness to radically rewrite the myth of The Ripper, in whose retellings women have time and again been denied any voice and agency. JACK’s concerns are not simply those of the 19th century, but equally of the 21st; we are reminded of the team’s desire to condemn “the violence that women suffer … [the] prejudice against women… because of the lives that they’ve led”. Yet this strong feminist and progressive message did not distract from the plot – it was the plot, embedded throughout, and driving the narrative.

JACK may have been named after the killer, but the women are its heroes, its tragedy, and, indeed, by the end its stars.

University of Oxford reveals UN Climate Summit programme

Mair Andrews
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University of Oxford reveals UN Climate Summit programme

The University of Oxford and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have announced the official programme and list of participating institutions for the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit.

The Summit will take place from 2nd to 8th June with the intention of uniting voices across continents to advance human rights-based climate solutions. This year it will be held virtually, anchored at Oxford but connected to universities across the world. This decentralised model has reduced the environmental cost involved in traditional summits which convene world experts in a single location. The Summit will be available to watch on a YouTube livestream. 

Alongside the University of Oxford and UN Human Rights, the 2025 programme includes many international institutions. It will be convened by the International Universities Climate Alliance who are taking a leading role as Summit co-hosts.

Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor and speaker at the Summit, said that this meeting will “bring together leaders in human rights and climate research from around the world, across a wide range of disciplines with the common goal of finding solutions to one of the most pressing issues of our times, climate change.”

Set to participate in the livestream are the University of Cape Town, University of Colorado Boulder, Himalayan University Consortium, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Monash University, University of Nairobi, Universidade de São Paulo, the University of the South Pacific, UNSW Sydney, and the University of the West Indies.

The plenary will begin at the Sheldonian Theatre with an introduction from the Vice-Chancellor, Irene Tracey, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.

The University of the South Pacific will speak first, focusing on youth perspectives on climate justice and discussions on climate change in the Pacific. Their programme will feature Cynthia Houniuhi, President of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change; Dr. Eselealofa Apinelu, Tuvaluan High Commissioner to Fiji; and Lenora Qereqeretabua, Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of Fiji.

Monash University will then present an interactive programme exploring Indigenous perspectives, the human right to health, and the unifying power of music across cultures in Asia and the Pacific. UNSW Sydney will host discussions on the human rights impacts of Australia’s fossil fuel exports. They aim to transform a partnership to resilience building through a dialogue on Indigenous Peoples and university engagement. The UN Human Rights and the International Universities Climate Alliance will follow this with a conversation on advancing gender equality in climate action.

Next up, the Himalayan University Consortium is set to host a four-way conversation on human rights-based climate action between a community member, a scientist, a policymaker, and an Indigenous knowledge holder from countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

Moving across time zones, the University of Nairobi will centre their discussions on human rights-based climate finance and human-rights based climate adaptation and resilience in Africa. The University of Cape Town will then provide insights into the relationship between climate change and human rights in Africa and the ways that teaching and research can advance human-rights based climate action. The International Universities Climate Alliance and UN Human Rights will facilitate a discussion on human rights and climate finance.

After that, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology will host a dialogue on how we can reframe the Sustainable Development Goals for a post-2030 world centred in human rights and planetary health.

The online Summit will then return to Oxford, where talks will assess the transformative power of international human rights law in climate action, the role of war in fuelling the climate crisis and vice versa, and business and human rights in the green transition. The final conversation facilitated by UN Human Rights and the International Universities Climate Alliance will then take place, focusing on integrating human rights in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

To follow, the conversation will move to the Atlantic to the University of Colorado Boulder. This will include a keynote from global advocate for Indigenous rights and health Siila (Sheila) Watt-Cloutier, before the University of the West Indies hosts a session on Caribbean youth perspectives on climate justice.

The Universidade de São Paulo will close the event with sessions on addressing deforestation and its contribution to the climate crisis as well as the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the rights of future generations in the context of climate change. This will include messages from government ministers and the President of COP30, Ambassador André Correia do Lago.

Finally, a closing session led by UN Human Rights will bring together key voices from across the world to share reflections on the global plenary, focusing on human rights-based climate action that can be taken right here, right now.

The cornerstone of the multi-day summit, the 24-hour global plenary will take place on 5 June 2025 for World Environment Day. The University of Oxford are hosting pre-summit events which can be viewed on their website. 

The global plenary will be streamed live on YouTube, beginning at 8pm BST on 4th June and continuing to 10.30pm BST on 5th June. Full details of the online global programme are available on the Summit hub.

Former Hertford Principal urges action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza

Conor Walsh
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Former Hertford Principal urges action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza

Tom Fletcher, the former Principal of Hertford College, addressed the United Nations (UN) Security Council on 13th May. In his new role as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, Fletcher urged the Council to “act – decisively – to prevent genocide” in Gaza.

As Under-Secretary-General, Fletcher leads the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN body responsible for coordinating international responses to complex emergencies and natural disasters. This includes the delivery of aid to Gaza.

In his speech, Fletcher briefed the Council about the ongoing aid crisis in Gaza. He emphasised that, in the last ten weeks, little aid has entered the territory, 70% of which is either within Israeli-militarized zones or under displacement orders. As a consequence, “every single one of the 2.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip face the risk of famine. One in five face starvation.”

Fletcher began by asking the Council “what action we will tell future generations we each took to stop the 21st century atrocity to which we bear daily witness in Gaza.” This remark has subsequently sparked an open letter by the parent of an Oxford student who faces disciplinary action following the occupation of Vice-Chancellor Irene Tracey’s office on 23rd May 2024.

The letter appealed to Fletcher to call on the Vice-Chancellor, in the same way that he appealed to the Security Council, “to consider how future generations might judge her decision to prosecute students acting on their moral indignation about events in Gaza and to terminate the university’s proceedings against them.”

Fletcher went on to describe the dire state of Gaza’s medical system before urging the Council to let OCHA and other aid agencies resume humanitarian aid distribution. He said: “we have a plan. We have shown we can deliver, with tens of thousands of trucks reaching civilians during the ceasefire. We have life-saving supplies ready, now, at the borders. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors. We have rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians, and not to Hamas. But Israel denies us access, placing the objective of depopulating Gaza before the lives of civilians.”

Fletcher also reminded the Council of Israel’s obligations under humanitarian law, and drew attention to the growing violence in the West Bank where he described the situation as “the worst in decades” with “the use of heavy weaponry, military methods of war, excessive force, forcible displacement, demolitions and movement restrictions”.

In his concluding remarks, Fletcher said: “Humanity, the law and reason must prevail. This Council must prevail. Demand this ends. Stop arming it. Insist on accountability.

“To the Israeli authorities: stop killing and injuring civilians. Lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives. To Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups: release all hostages immediately and unconditionally. Stop putting civilians at risk during military operations.”

Since his address last Tuesday, Fletcher has been criticised for using the term “genocide” to describe the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In an interview with the Associated Press (AP), Fletcher defended his use of the term, saying that he wanted to “make sure that we aren’t making the mistake that was made with previous massive breaches of international law, where it hasn’t been called out soon enough”.

He told the AP that: “I’m not a lawyer. I’m a humanitarian. My job is to get the aid in, to get the attention of the world, to help create the conditions to get that aid in and save as many lives as possible before it’s too late.”

Danny Danon, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, addressed the media after Fletcher’s address to the Security Council last Tuesday. He said that “instead of admitting that the existing distribution system has failed, the UN insists on preserving Hamas’ supply pipeline.”

Danon went on to say that “This is not neutrality – this is support for terrorism. Israel will not cooperate with a mechanism that strengthens those who kidnapped, murdered, raped and tortured our citizens.”

The UN has stressed, repeatedly, that only a court can make the decision that genocide has been committed.

Fletcher was Principal of Hertford from 2020 to 2024, where he completed his undergraduate in Modern History. Before returning to Hertford as Principal, Fletcher was a diplomat and British foreign policy advisor, serving as British Ambassador to Lebanon between 2011 and 2015.

Oxford study to examine brain injuries in young athletes

Georgia Campbell
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Oxford study to examine brain injuries in young athletes

Oxford University’s Biomedical Engineering department is recruiting volunteers to participate in a two-year study exploring the impact of head injuries to the developing brains of 11-18 year-olds. 

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability amongst young people, but research into the area remains limited. It is estimated that up to 30% of children who suffer brain injuries experience medium or long term symptoms, with TBI proven to increase the risk of dementia, according to Alzheimer’s UK. Standard clinical imaging, such as CT scans, might miss key signs of injury that could prevent these long-term impacts.

Study author Isabella Lovgren told Cherwell: “At the moment, we struggle to predict how well young people will recover following a head injury. We’re hoping that our advanced research MRI scans will be able to detect injury that would otherwise be missed”.

The researchers will look specifically for microstructural injury to nerve cells and changes in levels of brain chemicals. Through understanding the extent of the injury, they hope to ensure that the necessary support and care can be provided sooner, to “maximise each young person’s chances of making the best recovery possible”. 

Professor Natalie Voets, another researcher leading the study said: “Despite the potentially important long-term effects, paediatric head injury has remained heavily understudied. We’re deeply indebted to the Podium Institute and our collaborating clinical and sports teams for their enormous support in helping to make this challenging research possible.”

Participants aged 11-18 years are invited to attend two research visits at the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, based at John Radcliffe Hospital. The visits take place six months apart and include a 30-40 minute MRI scan, some questionnaires and a short paper task. The study is partnered with the medical team for Oxford United, as well as the NGO Podium Analytics, amongst other groups, and will be completed around the summer of 2027.

September 5: Journalism drama doesn’t question the facts enough

Janik Peeters
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September 5: Journalism drama doesn’t question the facts enough

Set during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 tracks the ABC Sports crew’s coverage of the Israeli athlete hostage crisis in the Olympic Village: the first terror attack broadcast live to the world. It’s determined to give us a realistic depiction of the journalists’ work, led by newly-promoted Geoff Mason (John Magaro). 

Near-everything happens in the team’s broadcasting rooms, whether it’s the painstaking editing of tapes smuggled through Olympic Village security, or Mason cueing shots from a bank of square monitors. There’s a deep reverence for the physical work these journalists do, coupled with a powerful hit of nostalgia from constant close-ups of wires and machinery – unflinching commitment to historical accuracy. 

The film largely disregards the politics of the event, as Fehlbaum has said he was focused on the act of journalism, not politics. It’s hard to begrudge him for that artistic choice, especially knowing the film was fully edited before the October 7 attacks and the atrocities that followed. Having said that, placing such heavy emphasis on his film’s depiction of journalistic work means Fehlbaum may have ended up creating a rod for his own back. For September 5’s perspective on journalistic ethics in many ways falls just as short as its politics.

Geoff Mason is at the heart of the film’s attempt to tackle those challenges. It is his decision to track the police’s first rescue attempt with a balcony camera, realising too late that the captors are watching their footage on TVs in the athletes’ rooms. They’re lucky it doesn’t result in a death, but still he presses on. It is also his choice to lead on news of a successful rescue before he receives confirmation from other sources, directly against the words of his superior Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin). These are both significant failures. They lead directly to the devastating moment presenter Jim McKay turns to camera and says that the hostages were not in fact rescued, but killed in a police shootout.

Fertile grounds for examining the ethics of broadcasting, then. But it never feels like the ABC crew has to reckon with those mistakes. After their filming sabotaged the first rescue attempt, German soldiers storm in and order their broadcast to be shut down. Within minutes, they’re back to reporting, with no consequences, and no second thoughts about the effects their coverage might be having. The film seems to assume we’ll be on ABC’s side, but it’s difficult to argue with the Germans’ attempt to keep their operation viable. 

One journalist’s later decision to hide from a police search of the surrounding buildings escapes comment entirely. And, though we end with a shot of Mason slumped over his car’s dashboard, his flawed approach is in fact rewarded: Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the head of ABC Sports, leaves us with no uncertainty about Geoff’s impending promotion.

In some ways, the film’s devotion to the historical record seems to restrict it at moments like these – it ends up being about the broadcast, and little else. The minor characters display a little of the effects of that relentless focus. The crew’s translator is given a thin anti-sexism plotline; Bader’s Jewish heritage is briefly mentioned: otherwise, near-total silence. The impression we get is ultimately that the news matters more than the stories. ABC’s journalists are beyond reproach, for they are simply recording history, not making it.

September 5 is in many ways a frustrating watch. It’s a frantic, tense, and exceptionally well-crafted film. But in its attempt to perfectly recreate the events of the 1972 Munich massacre, it forgoes a far more foundational aspect of the craft it so reveres: holding to account those with the power to shape the narrative.

Periodisation and the problem of now

Ava Doherty
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Periodisation and the problem of now

Periodisation is the act of dividing literature into eras like Romanticism, Modernism, or Postmodernism – neat, bounded categories based on unifying characteristics, themes, or historical shifts. It is how we order the chaos of literary history. But what happens when the chaos no longer submits to order? When literature refuses the boundaries we try to place on it? I doubt anyone knows what period we’re in now and here lies a crucial point.

Today’s literary landscape feels like an open field rather than a walled garden. We trespass mythic boundaries, slipping between grass verges and across stylistic and ideological thresholds. We hang in a liminal space – between the softness inherited from post-1960s idealism and Gen Z’s digital-era defiance. And yet, in an age of self-publishing, algorithms, and Twitter threads that read like flash fiction, how can we honestly claim to define this moment in literature by any single unifying trait?

To be a writer or reader today is to exist in a space that actively resists classification. Our present increasingly disavows binaries in gender, sexuality, and belief systems. Why should literature remain shackled to essentialising periodisation? The act of periodising demands the rigid structure we’ve been taught to interrogate. Literature has long been a space of ambiguity, of multiplicity. It is intertextual by nature, always pointing to something beyond itself. When Joan Didion titled her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she invoked Yeats’ The Second Coming. But what did she mean by it? Was it just a poetic allusion? Or a cry of yearning? Or perhaps it is a coded invocation of cultural collapse? The beauty lies in the not-knowing.

If this moment needs a name, it might be ‘anti-period’. It is a time not defined by invention but by un-invention. It is not an arrival at something new but a shedding of what no longer fits. The lingering influence of Romanticism, with its grandeur and ornamentation, hasn’t been replaced by a distinct new mode but by a rejection of form itself.

We are no longer tracing the arc of Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey – this idea that a character (or writer) must leave the familiar, undergo a transformation, and then return home no longer the same. We, and our characters, are not returning at all. Writers of this generation are like that gap year student who never comes home, stops replying to emails, shaves their head in Bali, and quietly evaporates into another life. The journey isn’t circular anymore – it’s porous, meandering, recursive, or without a destination.

The clean lines of the modernist structure have dissolved. Grammar is loosened. Punctuation is optional. Think of Sally Rooney, whose dialogue flows without quotation marks and evokes intimacy and immediacy. Sentences stretch or shatter, as in the work of Claudia Rankine or Jenny Offill, where fragments mirror fractured psyches. It could be rebellion. Or laziness. Or something more profound – a quiet resistance, a refusal to be boxed in. Instantaneous fame, viral visibility, micro-narratives – these fragment the literary canon. The Instagram poets, the autofictionists, the substack essayists: each chip away at the idea of a singular voice or form. Perhaps fragmentation is the most honest form of literature we can offer.

Think of Toni Morrison, who famously resisted traditional chapter structures and narrative clarity. In Beloved, the refusal to use conventional formatting mirrored the distortion and dislocation of memory under the weight of slavery. It wasn’t just a stylistic choice – an act of deconstruction, a challenge to the Western, white literary tradition, and a reminder of older oral traditions where the story was fluid, shared, and evolving.

Even here in Oxford, where tradition looms large and norms feel carved in stone, there are undercurrents. Between Bodleian stacks and essay crises, students are quietly subverting inherited forms. Some stick closely to the classics; others remix them. Footnotes live beside fanfiction. Shakespeare shares desk space with Emily Henry. Despite modernism’s slow creep into our syllabi, there’s often resistance to naming the new. As though if we acknowledge it, we also have to dismantle what came before.

But do we need to periodise to understand? Or can we accept what Keats termed ‘negative capability’: the capacity to dwell in uncertainty and doubt without feeling any itch for fact and reason?

Keats’ concept, centuries old, feels radical now. In a world where information is instantly accessible and truth must be verified, dwelling in ambiguity is countercultural. But perhaps that’s precisely what literature demands of us: the courage not to know, to sense, to feel, to intuit meaning. We didn’t need to understand Jane Eyre to feel its resonance fully, nor did we need to dissect Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea line by line to understand the echo and tension between them. We recognised something intuitively.

This may be what defines our era: an era of resistance to era. It is a moment when the label “post-postmodern” no longer satisfies, where the urge to categorise gives way to something looser, stranger, unstable, more human.

The paradox is that even as we resist periodisation, we continue to toy with it. Critics and academics will eventually try to name this age. They’ll trace its borders and identify its tropes. They’ll assign it a prefix. But the literature – fluid, fragmented, chaotic – may not care.

As Oxford students, we live with this tension daily. We write in the shadows of tradition yet are urged to innovate. We cite thinkers who rejected authority in essays judged by those who epitomise it. We are at once inheritors and rewriters of literary time. And perhaps that is the only unifying characteristic of now: the refusal to be unified.

St John’s President Sue Black on skinning rabbits, AI, and working in a war zone

Laurence Cooke
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St John’s President Sue Black on skinning rabbits, AI, and working in a war zone

CW: Violence 

Professor Lady Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome certainly has a title which precedes her. The President of St John’s made her name as an academic and forensic scientist who worked to identify victims in conflict zones including Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and then later the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. I sat down with Sue Black and asked her to give me a “whistle-stop tour” of her life and career which, given an experience which stretches from an Inverness butcher’s shop to the red benches of the Lords, might have been the most difficult question I asked that morning. 

First of all, Black paints a picture of someone whose childhood remains an integral part of their story: “I’ve always got stories”, she says. “Both my grandmother and my father were great storytellers, and so everything I have is a story, and it has been really useful for me that as you get older, you get the chance to stop, to turn around, and to look at the life you’ve taken”. Born in Inverness, Black grew up on the Scottish west coast, a native speaker of Gaelic. It is a far cry from the expensively-furnished college quarters where I sit with her now.  

Yet that upbringing planted the seed of her future career. “My father, as it happened, was a tremendous shot. I was his little shadow. And so when he would go out shooting [to eat, not for sport, she reassures me], I would carry home the dead rabbits and pheasants. I would sit at the back door with my father and he would teach me how to skin them.” 

There was little surprise about a career in forensics, then, when from a very young age, Black “thought nothing of having blood up to my elbows. It felt completely normal”. At thirteen, when her father, ever the Presbyterian, asked her what job she would get, she decided to work in a butcher’s shop. “So when all my friends were selling makeup in the chemists or selling clothes, I was up to my elbows in blood and guts and gore and loved it.” 

University wasn’t a consideration until a Biology teacher told her she had to go. “I lied to my parents. I told them I got a full grant, which I didn’t because at the age of 17, I decided that my parents couldn’t afford to support me: total arrogance. So I ran three different jobs at the same time as being in university because I’m not afraid of hard work.” 

Once at university, Black didn’t like zoology, genetics, chemistry (“my god”), or botany. But anatomy, that’s just the butcher’s shop: “I walked into the department and knew I was home”.  There was never any doubt: “My Biology teacher said I was going to be a scientist, so I had to be a scientist. There was never any doubt about that.” 

University came with challenges, though. Black’s parents, while loving, didn’t understand why she needed to go. She adds: “My mother believed I would leave school, I’d get a job in an office, I’d meet somebody and get married, I’d have children, and I’d live five minutes away from her… So when I went and did something different, she cried”. She was proud all the same, Black tells me, but “never understood” what she did for a living.

Black too sometimes wonders how she made it to where she is now: “I still have huge imposter syndrome [that says] my governing body is going to wake up and realise what a mistake they’ve made… so I never get to a point where I think, my goodness me, I’ve really made it.” When I probed to ask whether this makes her a good model for first-gen and state comp students for whom the idea of Oxford seems so alien, she just expresses her amazement at the students who “are all so much smarter than I am. I’ve got here through hard work, not through raw intelligence. You guys just intimidate the living daylights out of me.” 

She marvels at the intensity of the eight-week terms, and how people can balance their studies with other roles, whether at Cherwell or any other society. We’ve talked about jobs, so I mention what happened in Kosovo. There, Black was one of the first to work on identifying victims of war crimes committed in the Balkan Wars. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević later became the first sitting head of state indicted for such crimes. 

Shielded by the UN, her team entered across the Macedonian border. Scottish to her backbone, she never realised she was British until she saw the union jack painted on a tank coming right towards them and felt “the sheer sense of relief that says it’s ours”.

That didn’t end the nightmare, though, for their job was to enter a crime scene. 43 dead bodies, people rounded up into rooms “sprayed with Kalashnikov fire”. She tells me that “they [the criminals] stood at the window, threw in straw, threw in petrol, [and] torched the building. [The one survivor] had to lie underneath the dead bodies of his friends and his family who were burning above him because he knew if he came out he would be shot as well.” Black and her team had to return to that scene six months after the event, in 38 degree heat: “a boiling mass of maggots”. 

I ask how she can possibly work with such a sense of moral disgust. The solution: block it out. “It’s not your fight. You’re a scientist. Your job is to find the evidence, recover it, analyse it, report on it, and go home. And so I can’t allow myself to empathise and sympathise with those who are present. I can’t allow myself to get angry with those who are responsible. There are other people for whom that is their job, and if I bleed into their job, I’m not being the unbiased, impartial scientist I have to be.” For Black, “all focus is on the courtroom”. 

After a lengthy conversation about Kosovo and how it changed her personal outlook, I don’t really see how to proceed from here. How can you ask about such trivial matters as the House of Lords when you’ve just heard about such atrocities? When I ask about the Lords, I expect the usual answer about people being out-of-touch, of not doing real experience in the field, as Black does. 

The answer I get, however, comes as a surprise. She recognises the perception of “old people asleep on benches and having a nice lunch”, which she also had on arriving in the role, but claims “that was totally wrong”. She applied after being told that more scientists were needed in the Lords, and more women scientists in particular. “I put my CV in thinking, but it’s not going to happen anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” 

Of course, Black was successful and became the Baroness Black of Strome. Perhaps, she claims, it was her disdain for politics and power that landed her the role: “I was interviewed and one of the questions was ‘if you were offered a ministerial post, would you accept it?’ I said: ‘oh, for goodness sake, I couldn’t think of anything worse’. And they all burst out laughing. And apparently that was the right answer.” 

“Blown away by the breadth and depth of knowledge” in the House, she believes Crossbenchers in particular can offer important oversight. I press, though: should the Lords be abolished altogether? Surely the system is not fit for purpose, especially with regard to hereditary peers. Black has changed her views on the House, and sees “a genuine commitment to trying to do the right thing”, especially when they sat till 3am to debate the Rwanda Bill, a remarkable feat given the age of some parliamentarians. But of course, she adds, “I suppose if that’s what we vote for, that’s what we vote for. And of course I go with it.” 

Black does not vote often (she has no interest or knowledge of football, so why should she vote on it, she asks), but her record is noteworthy all the same. Two which stand out are support for amendments to the Safety of Rwanda Bill and the Elections Bill which opposed the then Conservative government. 

Being surrounded by death in her line of work, I figure Black will have some thoughts about the Assisted Dying Bill. She will vote in support, provided she is “convinced that the safeguards are in place”. She highlights the experiences of members of her own family and friends, as well as the importance of autonomy: “I feel that I am sufficiently comfortable with death, that when it is right for me, I want to be able to have that choice.” She cites studies from Ohio, where there is a history of legalised euthanasia dating as far back as 1906. “They’ve had the pill for a very long time”, Black adds, and “over 60% of those who have it don’t take it because [the value is in] knowing they have it.” She again repeats that if the safeguards aren’t sufficient, she will vote against. It may also take a lot of time, since there will be so much scrutiny. On the prospect of the Bill being passed quickly: “I really don’t think that’s a given”. 

Having moved quickly through a long career history with just a few stops, I feel obliged to mention St John’s. My own college, and the one Sue Black has presided over since 2022. In part, she tells me, because of the pain that is the West Cost Mainline. It became difficult to do House of Lords work while also living near Lancaster University, where she was Pro-Vice Chancellor for Engagement, and the commuting to London was impractical. A self-described “rainmaker”, Black had her eyes set on bringing in more big projects, which a small university like Lancaster would not necessarily be able to handle. 

The application to St John’s came across her desk, and much to her surprise given outside stereotypes about Oxford, “humanity, humility, and a strong moral compass” were the desired qualities. But surely this wasn’t for her, she said, for “they take pedigree”. Why would she have thoughts on the tutorial system when she never went to Oxford? 

That honesty carried her all the way to the role. Even bluntness seemed to help. In a video each candidate had to make as part of the selection process, Black said “I feel really sorry for St. John’s, how awful it is to be known as Oxford’s wealthiest college. Wouldn’t it be better to be known as its most welcoming or its most innovative, or its most enlightened, it’s most diverse. Anything has got to be better than being the wealthiest.” 

The process was, nonetheless, a long one. “I said to them, you need to understand I’m a Scottish Presbyterian. I’m never going to throw money at anything. So if we’re going to solve problems, we’ll solve them properly. And I thought that’ll be the end of that. And they invited me back again. So I’m thinking by this point, what can I say that’s going to put these people off?” As it turned out, nothing. 

I ask her for the weirdest thing she has to do as President. 

“Oh, lordy. President of St. John’s College. [Today] I’m going to go away and look at new samples for chairs in the chapel, and then later on in the week, we will go for a perambulation up to Bagley wood, and later on in the summer, we will go and have a perambulation to one of our farms. It’s the most ludicrous job I’ve ever done in my life!” 

Searching the crypt in the chapel was another job where Black’s previous experience was useful. “I’ve got responsibility not only for the living, but for the dead on these premises”, she tells me. Fortunately, “it’s the best kept crypt I’ve ever been in my life. And there are seven individuals buried down there, and the crypt is in perfect condition, never needs to be opened again for another a hundred years.”

I warned at the start of my interview that there would be some difficult policy questions, and it was at this point that I shifted my focus to buzzwords in Oxford: AI, free speech, and similar. Having attended the inauguration of Lord William Hague as Chancellor, I too heard him talk up the potential of artificial intelligence as a tool for exceptional change at the University. I ask Black if it’s more of an opportunity or a risk factor. 

While “a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to technology”, she notes that AI has changed the face of her own line of work. “We have trained the computers to identify where the hands of the perpetrator are in a video [of child sexual abuse]. I don’t need to look at the video anymore so it can extract the hands. Then we’ve been able to train computers to identify what is the vein pattern on that hand? What is the freckle pattern, the scar pattern, the skin crease pattern, and extract those, convert them into a multimodal biometric… we would never have been able to do manually.” 

This, however, is “white box” AI, where the reasoning process is still visible to human engineers. What is more concerning is “black box” AI, where the computer does not show its working. All the same, Black is “supportive of AI in a way in which it will help us to do things that we have not been able to do before, just by the limitation of our own ability. I couldn’t look at 5 million images. I simply couldn’t, but the computer can.” What that isn’t is letting a chatbot write your essay. “Are you cheating yourself when AI writes your essay for you?” she asks – “you are.” 

AI done, free speech next. Hague mentioned the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in his admission address. With a perception in some quarters that higher education needs more protections to ensure that people can speak freely on university campuses, I’m curious to know what Black’s experience across Dundee, Lancaster, and Oxford has shown her. 

“I fully believe that people should be able to voice their opinion as long as it is not inducing hatred or aggression of any kind, because we all have our views and it is really the most rewarding of places in a debate, where you have these different views. It’s one of those great human freedoms of being able to listen to a tapestry of perspectives and views, in a way that educates you to come to your own decision.”

“If at any point that freedom is suppressed, then you hear a disproportionate voice. I think we run the risk, with legislation, of altering that dynamic. It’s such a difficult topic because it’s so emotive as well, depending on what you’re talking about. But people should be emotional about things that matter to them, because if they’re not then they don’t matter to you.” 

“But as long as you don’t persecute somebody for it, as long as you don’t become aggressive or hateful about it, in a place like Oxford, where there are so many intelligent people, we should be in a position to hold those difficult discussions, with respect for everyone’s perspective.” 

“We just need to watch that the legislation doesn’t impact negatively on that ability. But I support it, 100%.” For Black, free speech is a vital enabler of the student experience: “you’re never going to be more critical of institutions than at your age. That’s what being a student is all about!” 

With that, I head out to my lecture, and Black switches gear again, to go and inspect new chairs for the chapel. 

Small Claims Court: Tools to Organise and Present Your Case

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Small Claims Court: Tools to Organise and Present Your Case

No one enjoys a legal tussle.

But if somebody owes you money, trashes your car, or fails to live up to an agreement, small claims court can be a fast, affordable way to get made whole. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t need a law degree. And you don’t need to spend a fortune to get justice. You just need a decent case. And you need to be able to present it coherently and convincingly.

But just having the facts on your side isn’t enough. You need to be prepared. That entails getting your dates and documents straight and organising your presentation in a way that judges can follow, often in just a few minutes.

The good news? You don’t have to figure it out on your own. Today’s smart tools and a little preparedness can help make you look like a pro the very first time you walk into a courtroom.

Start with a Solid Story

Your brief is more than just paper; it’s a narrative. Who did what, when, and why it matters. Create a compelling script, one that’s easy for the judge to digest. Direct the action as if you were making a film. Setting. Characters. Conflict. Evidence. Drop it when the jury least expects it. Keep it linear. Judges follow plots like everybody else.

Organise Like a Pro

Do this simple thing: bundle all your evidence according to the issue. Texts, emails, pictures, and everything should be in script order and collectively labelled. And never, ever, bury the lede. Annotate, add notes. Make your evidence do the heavy lifting. 

If you really want to impress the court, consider using smart legal tech like a small claims resolution platform. It helps you organise your documents, link evidence to claims, and build a clear, logical case that’s courtroom-ready. Think of it as your digital paralegal.

Bring Copies—And Then Some

There’s an old saying that you probably know: when you show the judge something, they need a copy. And the other side does too. Bring three copies of everything. One for yourself, one for the judge, one for the other side. Put it in a nice little binder or folder. With tabs and summaries of key evidence on the front, with bullets. Those little things are good for the judge to know you appreciate their time. They remember it.

Watch the Clock

You don’t get hours on the stand to plead your case. Small claims court trials are brief. It’s common for a trial to take as little as 10 or 15 minutes. That’s your window of time to speak persuasively. So be concise. Eliminate unnecessary details. Focus on the facts. Let your evidence do the persuading.

And the best way to stay focused? Use a case outline. Drop your facts into a simple form, attach your evidence, and print a concise summary to take to court. 

Real Talk: What Happens If You Lose?

Even people who are organised sometimes lose. The judge may also not like your style, or your opponent may have a strong case. That’s why you get ready like you’re going to win, and be clear on your Plan B. Ask about your rights on appeal, and understand the limitations (and your rights) of small claims court. 

Winning Your Small Claims With The Right Platform

Winning in small claims court isn’t a game of who can shout the loudest or who’s the angriest. It’s about who is most prepared. Tell your story. Show your receipts. Keep your cool. All you need is a plan, some tech, and a whole lot of heart.

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