Percy the tortoise, much-loved pet of University College, is aptly named after their greatest and most radical student, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The romantic poet whose frequently quoted verse has echoed through the generations, led a life that was not as aesthetic as his poetry might suggest. Eldest son of parliamentary Whig, Timothy Shelley, Percy whiled away his childhood in aristocratic tranquillity, fishing, hunting and being home-schooled. This sheltered upbringing clearly failed to prepare him for his teenage years at Eton where Percy was bullied by ‘Shelley-baits’ who reduced him each day to a high-pitched, screaming wreck.

At Oxford, Shelley only managed to attend one lecture since his time was taken up by sixteen hours of reading a day. He was later expelled for a radical pamphlet which he refused to recant, called ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. By this time, he had matured into a fiercely liberal poet whose radical views included public support for the poor and a non-exclusive model of love and marriage.

Shelley’s expulsion was followed swiftly by his passionate affair with Harriet Westbrook. They eloped to Scotland to rescue her from boarding school and from her suicidal depression. But this infatuation did not last long, Shelley began to suspect that she had married him for his money and he grew tired of her lack of intellectualism.

His craving for intellectual female companionship culminated in his falling in love with Mary Godwin. The pair met secretly at the grave of Mary’s famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In Mary, Shelley found the intellectual and artistic companion he had longed for.

Faced with the hostility of Mary’s father and the pregnancy of Harriet, Shelley and Mary ran away to Switzerland together, taking Mary’s younger sister Claire with them because of her French abilities. The trio travelled across Europe reciting aloud the works of literary greats and enjoying a bohemian lifestyle of creative indulgence and appreciation. They repeated a similar trip a few years later when they met the celebrated Byron, with whom Shelly formed an intense poetic friendship and by whom Claire fell pregnant.

But this lifestyle was not without its misfortune. Shelley’s insistence on following the desires of his heart broke the hearts of others. Within two months of each other both Harriet and Mary’s younger sister Fanny committed suicide, after being abandoned by the poet’s artistic trio. Shelley quickly married Mary in the hope of securing the guardianship of his children by Harriet, but was unsuccessful.

Shelley, Mary and their poetic acquaintances continued their bohemian life in Europe until 1822, when a boating accident sent him to a watery grave. At Shelley’s funeral his friend Trelawney, moved deeply by the poet’s death, snatched his heart from the depths of the funeral pyre, unable to bear the thought of such a great heart being reduced to common ashes.

He’s the Russian guy off Star Trek, right?

No. Not even close. A Russian doctor, born in 1860, who funded his university career by tutoring privately, catching and selling goldfinches, and (happily for us) writing short plays.

I thought we were talking about playwrights here?

He wrote both plays and short stories, though it’s debatable which he did better. He cranked out his first play Ivanov in just ten days; like the rest of his works, it would be critically acclaimed and form a staple of student and professional theatre.

Only ten days? He must have been a pretty prolific writer.

Actually, he only wrote five plays. Four of them are considered masterpieces, which probably gives him one of the highest success rates of any writer. He found his niche by eschewing the melodrama popular at the time, and letting all the dramatic high points occur offstage, simply showing his characters’ reactions.

Didn’t he also own a gun?

‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’ The literary technique that allows the introduction of apparent irrelevancies to make the writer look really clever later on became a favourite trick of Chekhov’s, usually in relation to depressed young Russian men committing suicide.

So, all-in-all, one to know?

Exactly. He never expected to be appreciated after his death in 1904, but he became a favourite of Hemingway, Joyce, and Woolf. The only person who really hated him was fellow 19th Russian literati Tolstoy, who thought he was ‘worse than Shakespeare’ – which, as far as theatrical insults go, is pretty tame.

Catch your interest?

Check-off these plays

Ivanov

The Marriage Proposal

The Seagull

Uncle Vanya

The Cherry Orchard

Hwæt is the point of Old English? For many of us English students, there’s no point in a discussion – it has to be done, and then after prelims you can either look smugly at Mitchell and Robinson sitting gathering dust on your shelf, or kick-start your second-hand book business.

But what if you chose to do it? (And, technically, in first year you do – most people are simply coerced out of Middle English to save it for later.) If you have the immense pleasure to be a joint-schools student such as yours truly, you can skip Old English – and then decide in your second year that actually, you’d like to give it a go.I’ve received many an exclamation of surprise when explaining my choices to others and, to be honest, this twentieth century fanatic has rather surprised herself.

So, what madness drove me to volunteer for something many others gladly leave behind? Well, firstly, I do German, which makes Old English ‘easier’ (only slightly) and secondly, it was… different? I know, not the most convincing argument in the world. But, by the time I’d reached half-way through second year, there didn’t seem to be much point in turning back.

Faced with your first essay, you’re thrust into an alien world – forced to forfeit your favourite allusions to Nietzschean philosophy or dehumanising mechanisms – you feel very disorientated.So you flick back and forth between The Wanderer and the glossary, you wade through the jumble of letters and muddle of cases, simultaneously scroll desperately through Companion articles, and you pray for some kind of salvation to come. Eventually though, you hit upon some alliterative emphasis, then some parallelism, and even a pun – you’ve found familiar territory at last. After that you slip more easily into the content itself; gold twinkles under the spotlight of glorification, and earth-walkers trudge through a pensive landscape of immense scope.

They may not have got around to inventing the radio yet, but something about the raw flexibility of thoughts outside of terminology allows Old English poetry to echo through a whole millennium. The ancient words can still reverberate off our own sensitivity to transience and playing with preconceptions through the wit of well-placed words.It reminds you that words don’t belong in a neatly limited glossary, and can catch you out if they turn out to be a false friend.

So take that, existential crisis! The past is getting its own back on the radical modern mind-boxes, and is reintroducing learned thought to good old-fashioned thinking.

After a quick pre-preview Goog­le, I discovered to my surprise that The Soldier’s Tale was actu­ally intended by Stravinsky not to be acted, but to be ‘read, played and danced’. My expectations were not disappointed but surpassed, if only in part because I did not know what to expect. But you can expect great things.

The plot itself is based on a Russian folk tale, and certainly retains the moral simplicity of a fable. Joseph is accosted by a devil, to whom he gives his fiddle in exchange for a book that will make him wealthy.

He is then persuaded to stay at the devil’s luxurious abode and teach him how to play the fiddle, thinking only to spend three days there. This turns out to actually last three years and tragedy ensues. For me, though, the story is just the half of it. What makes me really want to buy a ticket is the way the dancers communicate the emotions of their characters through sheer body language. The dialect they have chosen can only be described as a sort of contemporary ballet, as wildly fluid as emotions themselves.

Not being a dance connoisseur, I felt slightly out of place as I sat down for the first scene, in which Joseph the soldier plays his fiddle tempt­ing the spirits of the nearby stream out of their watery home. But as the music began, and the three dancers skipped into action, I was sucked in. I felt myself transported by the quirky grace of the dancers’ movements, a visual echo of the bouncing brass and free-spirited strings. Leaping up, throwing themselves down, sliding and gliding and generally reaching out into every corner of space, they sought to own the stage in a gentle and varied attack.

The homecoming scene really showed Stravinsky’s work and the cast’s skill at its best. Joseph, swing­ing from joyful hope to darkest dis­appointment as quickly as his feet could carry him across the stage, seemed to be both isolated and yet strangely in harmony with his fellow dancers, robotically dead-pan yet ex­pressively supple.

But words are not enough. This piece is not to be read about in a re­view, but to be heard and seen in the flesh. And if that isn’t enough, there’ll be a live orchestra, too.

To trace the ‘Swinging Sixties’ is to travel a well-trodden path: you don’t need more than a cursory knowledge to know that The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, free love and conspicuous drug-taking all featured heavily. In his new autobiography, My Cool Sixties: Lennon, Jagger & The Rest, journalist Tony Norman revisits that well-known history and, consequently, much of the book’s content is already familiar.

The title (which promises a lot more than Norman could ever deliver) refers to his meetings with John Lennon and Mick Jagger, although he didn’t exactly hang out with them regularly: the Jagger event was an interview for Top Pops magazine, whilst the interview with Lennon seems to have been conducted alongside several other journalists.

JFK’s assassination is covered, with Norman calling it ‘sad, sadder than sad’ (I think he’s trying to tell us it’s sad); Ursula Andress in Doctor No is ‘absolutely sexily gorgeous’ (another original insight); and the Mods and Rockers, fighting in Brighton, are ‘some blokes [having] a good punch-up’. He desperately tries to prove that he was in the midst of the free love movement when he recounts receiving a blow job from a random woman, yet he somehow misses the whole point when he writes, ‘that gentle, trippy sister of mercy definitely shone the light for free love. Will we meet again? Probably not, but I won’t forget her’.

An autobiography is an intensely personal medium, yet Norman has filled his book with references to events that he had very little to do with. By relating his life vicariously through that which we already know, Norman has stumbled upon one of the most lasting legacies of the Sixties: the faddism of youth culture (although you’d be better off watching Quadrophenia or American Graffiti for more entertaining explorations of this). Things become relatively more interesting when Norman talks about his home life, but this book tells us as much about the reality of that decade as Austin Powers or The Ruttles, and I know as much about Tony Norman the man after finishing this dull read as I did when I started.

Besides the predictable content, Norman’s style also leaves much to be desired: he ‘plecks’ his bass with his ‘pluctrum’ and bands are ‘fabtastic’. Somehow it was deemed advisable to use huge strings of words, so that we are confronted with the ‘oldladynakedinthebathroom’ shock, and adults’ hatred ‘nastynoisyelectricguitarslikethatcrazyrebelBobDylan’.

Tony Norman should have heeded his editor’s advice when he overstepped the mark, asking Jagger about his drug habits:

‘Why did you even go there? I mean drugs, you must have known…’

‘I just… Rolling Stone… wanted to be like Rolling Stone’.

‘I’d stick to being Tony Norman if I were you’.