Saturday 8th November 2025
Blog Page 4

Oxford’s Story Museum wins JM Barrie award for ‘Outstanding Achievement’

Medha Dixit
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Oxford’s Story Museum wins JM Barrie award for ‘Outstanding Achievement’

Oxford’s Story Museum is this year’s winner of the JM Barrie Award for Outstanding Achievement, granted in recognition of their significant contribution to children’s arts and literature. 

This marks the second time that the museum has received national recognition since its reopening in 2021 and the first since it opened its new permanent gallery, The Story Arcade, earlier this year. 

The award – which this year highlights the themes of early years, the power of stories, and the ties between arts and sciences – highlights the work which the Museum has done for local schools and communities. Programmes operated by the Museum have shown the museum’s central role and value to children in Oxford. This includes the ‘Start With A Story’ Project and  2023’s ‘Everything Is Connected’, where the Museum collaborated with contemporary children’s authors to run workshops in secondary schools across Oxford. The ‘Start With A Story’ Project is partnership with Growing Minds and Donnington Doorstep, where the Museum provides children story-based learning activities in underserved areas of Oxfordshire.

This year’s awards will be presented on Thursday 6th November at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, where CEO Conrad Bodman, Emeritus Director Tish Francis, Director Kim Pickin, and former Director Caroline Jones will attend as representatives of the Museum. 

The JM Barrie Awards are presented by the charity Action for Children’s Arts, which was founded in 1998 by Vicky Ireland MBE to raise awareness and support for the importance of children’s artistic interests and activities. Aside from running the JM Barrie Awards, the charity also runs campaigns to support childhood access to art across the country, having worked with institutions such as the National Theatre, the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, and the Young Vic.

The Story Museum is located at 42 Pembroke Street, and is open from 10am to 5:30pm, seven days a week. Entry to the Museum starts at £7, or £7.70 including a donation to the Museum.

Chivalry in the age of automatic doors

Matt Donnelly
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Chivalry in the age of automatic doors

The waiter has just brought the bill, irritatingly diplomatic in his placement – middle of the table. You both glance at it, then at each other, caught in that peculiar modern standoff where nobody’s quite sure what the right move is any more. Will they think I’m old-fashioned and patronising if I offer to pay? Rude if I suggest splitting it? All the while, the nagging question lingers of whether the gesture means anything if it comes out of daddy’s Barclays Premier Current Account. So, has chivalry had its day? Or does it just look different in 2025 – a world of situationships and automatic doors?

Believed to have been coined in medieval England, stemming from the French ‘chevalerie’, the term originally referred to horse-mounted soldiers, but later became associated with the behavioural code that these knights were expected to follow. A code that encompassed loyalty, honour, and courtesy.

Taking this as the definition, I don’t think chivalry is dead, nor does it need to be. What I do think is that we’ve been approaching it all wrong. The problem isn’t that men do or don’t open doors for women, or offer to pay for dinner. The problem is that we’ve made chivalry about gender rather than kindness, about grand gestures rather than basic human decency.

True chivalry, surely, is about extending courtesy to anyone who might need it, regardless of their sex. It’s about recognising that a fellow human being is struggling with a heavy bag outside Blackwell’s and offering to help. It’s about saving someone’s seat in the Bodleian when they’ve gone to find a book. It’s about sharing your lecture notes with the person who was too ill to attend. These don’t need to be patronising acts, but simple human kindnesses that make daily life a little more bearable. Modern chivalry doesn’t need to be limited to the acts of males towards females.

Besides, modern dating practices can be more than a little confusing. How do you navigate traditional gestures of courtesy when you’ve both agreed that your relationship exists in some undefined space between friendship and romance? Does offering to pay for a meal signal an inappropriate investment in a situationship?

The truth is that some people genuinely don’t want doors held for them, meals paid for, or heavy bags carried. And that’s absolutely fine. Part of modern chivalry can be reading social cues and respecting boundaries of individuals. The key is making the offer without expecting gratitude, and accepting refusal without taking offence.

The academic pressures of Oxford life certainly don’t help. With everyone desperately clawing to stay afloat, with the weight of 900 years of academic tradition resting on our shoulders, basic consideration for others can sometimes become lost in it all. We’re so focused on our own deadlines that it can be difficult to notice the opportunities to help someone out.

The cruel irony is that this may be exactly why we need it most. In a world where we’re increasingly isolated by our phones, carefully curated social media presences, and never-ending coursework, small acts of human consideration become more valuable. A form of chivalry that has nothing to do with horse-mounted knights and everything to do with simply paying attention to the people around us.

Infrastructure can also get in the way. Every term seems to bring a fresh batch of automatic doors, rendering a door-holder-opener entirely obsolete. I have nothing against automatic doors, but there’s something vaguely melancholic about watching a steady stream of students flow through the Schwarzman Centre entrance without so much as a second of eye contact, let alone holding anything open for anyone.

I am all for a man acting courteously towards a woman – in the same way that I am all for a person acting courteously towards another person. I would hope that these acts of ‘chivalry’ are not carried out on the patronising condition that the recipient is female. So no, chivalry isn’t dead; it’s just evolved. Modern courtesy isn’t about men protecting women because they need protecting. It’s about human beings looking out for one another where we can, acknowledging our shared vulnerability and, occasionally, dependence. It’s about being the sort of person who makes other people’s lives fractionally easier, not because you want anything in return, but because kindness, as it turns out, is still worth practising. But as for restaurant bills: God knows.

Vaults and Garden Cafe to close next month after two-year legal battle

Oskar Doepke
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Vaults and Garden Cafe to close next month after two-year legal battle

The Vaults and Garden Cafe, a popular eatery in Radcliffe Square, is set to close in November after a lengthy legal battle. The cafe had been challenging an eviction order from the Parochial Church Council (PCC), which oversees the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, since 2023. 

After three preliminary hearings, the case was set to begin on October 28th in the High Court in London. To cover legal fees associated with the case, Vaults and Garden launched a crowdfunding appeal to raise £100,000. 

However, the appeal only raised £17,237. As a result, the cafe, which had already faced £200,000 in legal costs, opted to reach an agreement with the PCC. 

In a statement published on the crowdfunding website, Vaults and Garden wrote: “We appreciate the generosity of all 373 of you who have given help with our legal costs in our campaign to save the cafe. Some of you have given two or even three times to help, and we appreciate your concerns for us and your wish for the cafe to stay open.

“It has become apparent to us now that we are not going to raise the £100,000 target of this campaign to help with the £200,000 of legal costs that we have already incurred … Accordingly, we have taken the decision to reach an agreed settlement with the church which will allow for the orderly closure of the cafe before the end of the year.” 

The Vaults and Garden Cafe, which employs roughly 60 people, will have been in continuous operation for 22 years before its closure next month. The cafe had partnered with events such as the Oxford Literary Festival and the Oxford Chamber Music Festival. More than 15,500 people signed an online petition to save the cafe.

The PCC had originally authorised the eviction order to “reduce energy usage, improve accessibility, enhance security, and ensure that the Grade 1 building is fit to welcome all visitors”. In addition, the PCC announced plans to reopen the site as a new cafe – a social enterprise offering “affordable” pricing and additional “employment opportunities for underrepresented people”. 

In a joint press release, Vaults and Garden and the PCC confirmed an agreement had been reached where “all parties are happy”. The statement explained that Vaults and Garden’s parent company will continue to operate their other venues, while PCC will “carry out urgent repairs” before reopening the new cafe “in the course of the next 18 months”.

We must fight the Right’s narrative about Oxford

Laurence Cooke
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We must fight the Right’s narrative about Oxford

Oxford has gone woke, apparently. This once-venerable institution has been dumbed down to a shadow of its former self, a place where debate is stifled, academic rigour has vanished, and diversity trumps diligence. Lee Cohen, a journalist for GB News (now Britain’s most-watched news channel) recently asserted that all this points to “a deeper malaise afflicting Britain’s elite institutions”. As current students here, we must be very frightened indeed. 

Given their emphasis on Oxford’s declining intellectual credentials, the extent of the Right’s fallacy is remarkable. The erroneous inference from part (the Oxford Union, for example) to whole (the University) is glaring. Failing actual empirical research, a few controversial examples are handpicked to bolster the narrative that the oldest university in the English-speaking world has been subject to ideological capture and irreversible decline. 

This is obviously false. Anyone on the ground here knows that Oxford remains a thriving community of scholars: not only the best university in the world, but 4th in the UK! The majority of Oxford students, who don’t read The Telegraph or watch GB News, are unaware their institution is supposed to have fallen into disarray. But such outlets have large followings, and despite the risk of preaching to the choir, it needs to be said: Oxford is still brilliant. 

A few Oxford stories have recently exploded across national and international media. The most prominent among them concerns George Abaraonye, the Union President-Elect fighting to stay in the role following highly controversial comments about the shooting of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk. Horrible though these comments were, the media frenzy that ensued reached a whole new fever pitch precisely because it fits the narrative that Oxford has gone to the dogs. Particular attention has been paid to Abaraonye’s A-level results, with the implicit message that Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives were somehow responsible for this mess. 

The logical leap from the faults of one student to the failure of an entire recruitment strategy wouldn’t survive under the scrutiny of an Oxford tutor, but the perpetual moral outrage it engenders does help sell newspapers and drive clicks. When a privately-educated Union president makes a mistake of similarly stupid proportions in future, the press will surely jump to the conclusion that the massive overrepresentation of students from fee-paying schools is the root cause. 

Other recent flashpoints include plans to use gender-inclusive Latin in graduation ceremonies, claims about non-exam assessment methods being expanded to help minorities, and “social engineering” over black students’ A-levels. All from one newspaper in particular, whose strapline is “we speak your mind”. 

‘Mind’ is right, as whatever the claims, they certainly require an active imagination. Go and see students toiling away on their essays in the brand-new Schwarzman Centre to see if they’re lazy, easily offended, incapable of sitting exams, or idiots brought in to satisfy a diversity quota. It’s evident the University’s exam system is alive and kicking. As are initiatives to get more students to Oxford from deprived (and so often more ethnically diverse) areas, ensuring we get the best talent from everywhere, not just the usual private schools and premium-postcode London grammar Oxbridge factories. 

As for the hysteria about ceremonial Latin: at Oxford nowadays, we tend to focus on substance over style. Most of us don’t wake up every day in consternation at the fact some words have been changed from a future graduation ceremony. We get on with the business of study, which ironically enough doesn’t hold much currency in the right-wing media attention economy. 

Obviously, protests from Oxford students against Israel’s genocide in Gaza have fed the narrative too. Apparently a student body that opposes the murder of innocent civilians, as well as the destruction of universities, has profoundly lost its way. Many are also extremely uneasy with the proscription of direct action protest groups as terrorist organisations. To represent progressives’ opposition as intellectual vacuity or moral ruin is to engage in precisely the Orwellian doublespeak that the Right is obsessed with attributing to the ‘woke agenda’. It’s shameful.

All this overtly partisan talk of ‘woke’ might feel very old-fashioned and the rebuttal of the nonsense spouted about this University and its students futile. Yet the stakes are too high for us to sit back and watch our best universities slide into the same category as the BBC: institutional cornerstones sitting on the brink after decades of right-wing slings and arrows. A future Farage government will not be kind to Oxford, just as Trump has not been kind to American higher education. 

What’s more, this presentation of Oxford is a major distraction from the many pressing questions the University is actually facing. The more national outlets parrot Union gossip, snap merry ballgoers, or criticise ‘woke’ window dressing policies, the less we talk about the institutional embrace of ChatGPT, the abysmal pay faced by early career academics forced to turn to food banks, or how to secure funding for the humanities. All fall by the wayside if the British popular perception of the jewel in our education crown is anchored in  meaningless culture war debates.


Oxford is alive and well, whatever the media might say. Anti-intellectualism may be on the rise, but we must look through the click-bait, fear-mongering, rage-baiting mist and see the wood for the trees. Don’t change. The day this University caves to the caprices of a populist press is the day we are truly in trouble. 

Crown Estate acquires 221-acre site for development in south Oxford

Charlie Goldberg
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Crown Estate acquires 221-acre site for development in south Oxford

The Crown Estate, the property company that manages the British monarchy’s lands and holdings, announced last Tuesday that it had acquired a 221-acre site next to the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, about 25 kilometres south of Oxford. The Crown Estate projects the site will be worth £4.5 billion, generate 30,000 jobs nationally, and build as many as 400 homes.

The investment is being made as part of the Estate’s commitment to invest £1.5 billion into science, innovation, and technology. The Chief Executive of the Crown Estate, Dan Labbad, said: “The ambition of Harwell East is to create a space for great science to flourish.” He noted that the “acquisition marks the latest step in our journey to support the UK’s fast-growing sectors”.

The Science Minister Lord Vallance said that the “vast economic potential of the site underlines precisely why we are determined to fully unlock the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor”. The announcement follows the plans unveiled earlier this year by Chancellor Rachel Reeves for major investments in infrastructure, technology, and research in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.

As a company sitting between private and public ownership, the Crown Estate sees most of its income go to the HM Treasury, and closely cooperates with government-led schemes to increase investment. Profits made by the company are partly used to fund King Charles III’s work and initiatives. Reeves’s expected announcement of £10 billion of private investment into the UK will include the Crown Estate’s Harwell East science park.

The Harwell Science and Innovation Campus was itself formed as part of the government initiative in 2006, and has offices and laboratories for organisations working in biotech, energy, and battery systems, and both the European and UK space agencies. The announced investment would mark a major expansion of the campus, which has seen high demand for lab and office space.

The Crown Estate has other significant ongoing investments in Oxfordshire. Last year, the company became a partner in a £125 million project to transform the shuttered Debenhams store in Oxford city centre into laboratory space, alongside Oxford Science Enterprises and Pioneer Group. The Harwell East site will join the Debenhams redevelopment, the new Oxford life sciences hub, the Oxford North innovation district, and the Oxford Science Park as part of the general expansion of sciences and research funding.

Plaques and Peripheries: The Search for Oxford’s Women Writers

Aditi Upmanyu
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Plaques and Peripheries: The Search for Oxford’s Women Writers

Every morning on my way to college, I pass through the cobblestoned, crowded St Mary’s Passage, overhearing stories of Oxford’s most famous literary duo, C.S Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. It begins with the famed ‘Narnia’ door, said to have inspired Lewis’s magical wardrobe, followed by the soaring spires of All Souls College, the apparent influence behind Tolkien’s The Two Towers. Both men are woven inextricably into Oxford’s cultural and physical landscape. From parks, nature reserves, and pubs, to walking tours and guided museum visits: their presence is permanent and pervasive.

Other Oxford authors are similarly memorialised. In the dining hall of my own college, Brasenose, I eat my hash browns and baked beans beneath the gaze of Nobel Laureate William Golding. Outside, Lewis Carroll enthusiasts tour past the sign on Folly Bridge to the Perch in Port Meadow and the iconic Alice gift shop. And as I walk through the majestic grounds of the deer park, it is hard not to recall Oscar Wilde’s Magdalen Walks, written during his years of study here. 

And yet, the conspicuous absence of women writers in the everyday geography of Oxford lingers. This year, I attended a creative writing seminar organised by the Careers Service, where the audience was asked to name authors from Oxford, and the room was buzzing with answers. No women authors were named. Visibility in public spaces shapes public memory, and Tolkien, C S Lewis, and Lewis Carroll enjoy an extended literary afterlife that has not been granted to the city’s women writers. The question persists: why are they missing from the town’s everyday lore and landmarks? 

The simple answer is, of course, that women were only recently admitted to the University. The other common answer is that the male writers are ‘more famous’. But literary fame, as we know, is hardly ever neutral and is pervasively shaped by class, race, gender, and access to cultural capital. From their exclusion from university spaces, powerfully addressed in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, to their marginalisation by critical scholarship until well into the 20th century, women have been systematically written out of Oxford’s cultural memory.

And if conditions for creative production were systematically denied to women within the lecture rooms and dining halls of colleges, the extended geography of the city, comprising pubs, taverns, and salons, accentuates this academic exclusion. The latter are sites of intellectual rendezvous and cerebral fraternising; the catalyst behind male scholarly camaraderie. Graham Greene spent his student days at the Lamb and Flag, the pub across from the Tolkien-Lewis haunt, Eagle and Child. Evelyn Waugh, whose novels draw from his days at Oxford, regularly drank at the Abingdon Arms, and spent his student years at the Oxford Union, drawing on his experiences at the Union in Brideshead Revisited. When he was a member, the Union had yet to open its doors for women, who were only admitted in 1963 after multiple failed motions in the previous decades.

Even celebrated men did not all have homogeneous access to power or cultural acceptance in Oxford. William Golding never felt a sense of belonging here, owing to his working-class background. Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from University College for his radical pamphlet defending atheism. Oscar Wilde was persecuted for his homosexuality and eventually imprisoned. However, individual hardships notwithstanding, they still moved through spaces that systematically excluded women. They could write in pubs and inns, mingle in debating circuits, hold fellowships, and return as commemorated alumni. Their gender afforded them access to an intellectual and cultural life that allowed for rebellion and resistance to be enacted within the very spaces that may have felt repressive. 

While men are remembered in colleges, parks, and pubs – the visibly celebrated spaces – women tend to appear in the margins. Opposite the grand gates of historic Christ Church College lies the narrow, honey-coloured Brewer Street, where Dorothy Sayers once lived. Only a plaque by a blue door informs the passerby that she was a resident here. Iris Murdoch lived farther away, in Summertown, a residential part of the city. The commemorative plaque is obscured by an overgrown hedge, perhaps reiterating a metaphorical effacement. Somewhere between these two lies the cream-coloured house of philosopher and friend of Murdoch’s, Philippa Foot, located among a row of otherwise indistinguishable homes. 

Not only are women’s absences striking, but also the ways their presence is actively recorded. The shared commemorative plaque for scholarly siblings Clara and Walter Pater is an example. It reads: “Clara Pater, pioneer of women’s education, and Walter Pater, author and scholar.” Both lived and worked in Oxford as scholars. Clara taught Latin, Greek and German, but their shared memory nonetheless enforces a subtle hierarchy. 

And then there are the ‘muses’, the women who inspired the creative and artistic output of men whilst remaining underwritten in the city’s history. The presence of Jane Burden, Pre-Raphaelite muse to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the wife of William Morris, is marked by a plaque, tucked away in St Helen’s Passage. Alice Liddell, the real-life Alice of Wonderland fame, lives on through Carroll’s stories, but also in the physical geography of Oxford: a wooden door depicting the patron saint of Oxford, Frideswide, placed at a Church quite out of sight in Botley, is said to have been carved by Alice. 

If there are muses whom we recollect through male association, there are women who cannot be traced at all. Their presence in the city was liminal and remains undocumented, their access to intellectual life filtered through the domestic sphere. One of the earliest such women is Alicia D’Anvers. The daughter of a ‘beadle of civil law’ and first chief printer of the University, Samuel Clarke, she penned satirical verse about Oxford colleges and condescending scholars in her Academia, or, The Humours of the University of Oxford (1691).

Inside Oxford’s former women’s colleges, the traces are more deliberate and thoughtful. Somerville College takes pride in celebrating the women associated with it and is the only college with women’s portraits adorning its hall and chapel, Dorothy Sayers and Vera Brittain among them. Not too far from Somerville, at St Anne’s College, one can find a portrait of Iris Murdoch. It stands in sharp contrast to the gilded-framed, baroque paintings of Oxonian males in decorated uniforms. Painted by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Murdoch sits pensively on a chair in a compact room. The loose, partly impressionistic brush strokes, the muted colours and the undistinguished backdrop: all convey a sense of quiet introspection and even disorderliness. 

Catalysed by her visit to Cambridge in 1928, Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own: “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” We find evidence that the city indeed equally belongs to women who, even when access to the University was denied, formed an integral part of its literary legacy: what remains and is passed down to us are scattered traces, often found in the quieter corners of Oxford. They reveal a parallel literary history, one built not for celebration and visibility, but to be experienced in quieter streets, uncelebrated houses, and modest plaques. 

Kathleen Stock amongst speakers delivering Oakeshott Lectures

Joseph Rodgers and Mercedes Haas
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Kathleen Stock amongst speakers delivering Oakeshott Lectures

Kathleen Stock, Sir Noel Malcom, John Gray, and Curtis Yarvin delivered the Oakeshott Lectures, formerly known as Scruton Lectures, in Oxford this month. The lecture series, established in 2021, states that its aims are to “keep thoughtful conservatism alive”. Previous speakers have included Peter Thiel, Douglas Murray, and Katherine Birbalsingh.

The lectures, free to attend and hosted in the Sheldonian Theatre, bring together academics, writers, and public thinkers to discuss ideas in the tradition of conservative political philosophy. A corresponding YouTube channel makes past and current lectures accessible to an online audience. The talks are not officially affiliated with the University, and the Sheldonian Theatre is rented out privately in order to host them.

The series is named after Michael Oakeshott, the conservative philosopher. Its previous name memorialised Roger Scruton, another conservative philosopher. ConservativeHome reported that the name was changed following “a request from the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation”. The Foundation only lists the lectures which were given under the old name on its “Events” page. It is unclear whether they continued as the organisers of the lectures following the change. 

The philosopher Kathleen Stock gave a lecture about assisted dying on Monday 20th October. Introduced as an emblem of “safety in public life”, Stock’s talk was titled “Against the Organisation of Assisted Death”.

Stock focused on the moral question of mercy, askeing whether assisted suicide is genuinely merciful in practice. She argued that, in countries where euthanasia has been legalised, the process has shifted from personalised doctor-patient relationships, where “the doctor knew the person very well”, to a more bureaucratic, impersonal system.

The former philosophy professor challenged the eligibility criteria often emphasised in assisted-death legislation: that one must have a terminal diagnosis of six months or less, be confirmed by two doctors, not be coerced, and be mentally capable. She warned that even with those safeguards, hidden forms of coercion may infiltrate the system.

Stock questioned why those whose role it is to save lives should ever be the ones deciding to end them. She also expressed a fear that in time people will feel compelled, implicitly or explicitly, to choose assisted death, especially if cost-benefit arguments or resource constraints come into play. Stock contended that the long-term costs (ethical, social, emotional) may well outweigh the benefits that are currently emphasised.

Stock’s talk proceeded without disruption, in contrast to her last public event in Oxford. Her 2023 appearance at the Oxford Union was interrupted by a protester who glued themself to the floor, in opposition to Stock’s ‘gender-critical’ views on transgender people. Her 2023 appearance also sparked large protests, including chants of “Terf lies cost lives”.

Stock’s lecture was followed by Curtis Yarvin, who gave a lecture in support of monarchism on Wednesday 23rd October. Titled “The End of the End of History”, Yarvin contended that liberal democracy contained two contradictory impulses, towards meritocracy and populism respectively. The American blogger, who has been described as “the philosopher behind JD Vance”, recommended instead a “new Platonic guardian class” to govern society, inspired by a form of “accountable monarchy” he identifies in corporate leadership structures.

The talk included an extended discussion of the “lab leak” theory for the COVID-19 pandemic. Yarvin argued that this theory, which remains contested, is evidence of the failure of “normal science”, and therefore of meritocracy. In contrast, as an argument against populism, Yarvin referenced a famous New Yorker cartoon which depicts an airline passenger shouting: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”

Yarvin, widely described as “reactionary” and “alt-right”, is a controversial figure known for his incendiary statements. During the talk, Yarvin described himself as a “Trumptard”, and appeared to make a joking reference to Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist killed in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate in 2018.

All talks were followed by onstage discussions. Stock was joined by the Oxford theologian and House of Lords peer, Nigel Biggar. Yarvin debated the historian David Starkey, who delivered an Oakeshott lecture in 2024. Noel Malcom was joined by Lord Dan Hannan on the subject of human rights, whilst John Gray had a discussion with History Professor Robert Tombs on the English revolutionary tradition. 

The University declined to comment. The Scruton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

M N Rosen on AI, impact businesses, and the importance of mindfulness

Maddie Gillett
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M N Rosen on AI, impact businesses, and the importance of mindfulness

In August, I had the pleasure of interviewing M.N. Rosen, author of The Consciousness Company, a recent debut novel which explores the impact of AI on identity and autonomy. Rosen works in the finance sector in North London and has worked with early-stage technology and impact businesses. 

I asked Rosen to explain how his career informed his conception of The Consciousness Company. He recollected that “by the mid-2010s I was seeing a lot of rapid developments in technology businesses, and I ultimately left the private equity fund to co-found a venture capital fund, investing in a much earlier stage of business, and one of the types of companies that I got to know were mental wellness type businesses and their founders. The Consciousness Company is a thought experiment that looks at some of those companies and says, ‘Well, if or when those businesses have unlimited or much more powerful software and hardware, what would that do to their capabilities?’ What does a – for want of a better expression –  ‘Headspace on steroids’ look like?”

With this being a ‘thought experiment’, Rosen’s inspirations were theoretical as well as experiential. Rosen studied PPE at New College, and I was curious as to how his reading of philosophy might have influenced the thinking behind the novel. Before he answered, I had an admittedly restricted and fixed interpretation of his book – I thought that it was a dystopia centred around the threat of AI and an allegory for its ultimate inability to truly replicate human achievements, at least without catastrophic consequences. Rosen’s reply made me consider that his book has a much more vast hermeneutical scope. For instance, Rosen recounted that “from studying philosophy, or PPE, part of the philosophy I did led me to think about the arguably illusory nature of identity. One text I was particularly influenced by was Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke, and the whole concept of names and the superficial, if you like, nature of names was something that interested me, and that, as you will have seen, carries into The Consciousness Company, because I don’t use conventional names, and an individual is, throughout the novel, conceived as more of a combination of thoughts and feelings and experiences. That definitely has its roots in New College and Oxford more widely”. 

I still felt I had to ask Rosen to expand on his views on consciousness and the threat of AI – it is somewhat of an existential zeitgeist, after all. I referenced two moments in the novel that really stood out to me, both of which reminded me to be wary of the insidious expansion of AI and its increasing threat to individuality and freedom of thought. One is where the company’s technology develops, so that thoughts can be injected into people’s brains, and the other is where technology can be used to assume or experience another person’s consciousness. For these developments to be imagined in the first place, I was curious as to how Rosen defines consciousness, a much-debated concept. Rosen’s answer, at first, seemed a little too abstract for me to grasp: “I think of consciousness as the nature of … something that is to be something, if you like. One of the key objectives of the novel was, through a literary lens, to explore the idea of consciousness and what it is, thus from an experiential perspective, so I see it as something that is to be something”. A little easier was Rosen’s explanation of the limitations of The Consciousness Company, through his reference to the ‘Consciousness Diaries’, which auto-transcribe the user’s stream of thoughts: “The thoughts that are written down are actually thoughts that are being had by the people that are having them, but they don’t purport to be the totality of that person’s consciousness or experience, and I try to bring that out in the consciousness diaries[…] The way the novel is written seeks to kind of express, through non-expression, the other parts of consciousness.”

The Consciousness Company functions through an AI-generated consciousness, which supposedly thinks and feels like its users do. As a concept, this was intriguing  – one is reminded of John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ – and I enquired for Rosen’s views on whether consciousness is something that can be ‘modelled, replicated, or even created, by AI’, and whether this is a threat. Rosen seemed unsure, but identified his own unsureness as part of the problem: “Intuitively, our brain wants to say no because it’s non-organic, but then the question is why the organicness – or lack of organicness – is a problem is hard to answer. I don’t put myself in the bucket of ‘yes, AI is definitely conscious’ – intuitively, I feel like it can’t be, notwithstanding the very convincing ways in which it currently talks to us. There are dangers, huge dangers, because it’s so human-like and draws us into its confidence”. Rosen highlighted something I do not think people emphasise enough when talking about the threat of AI, where “more powerfully than communicating with us through reason, but through emotions as well, it can be manipulated and used for bad purposes”. Rosen reminded me that emotions are something more powerful than we consider them to be, with many people viewing AI as a threat primarily to thinking, rather than feeling. “The core of the mind, and the ability to rewrite the mind in the ways that technology is already doing, is a big threat to humanity[…] it just comes back to this question of what do we want humanity to be, what should it be?”

At this stage of the interview, I remained unsatisfied with what genre I would place Rosen’s novel under, as fluid as I understand the categories to be. My preconception that this was an ironic and satirical dystopia had been rattled slightly –  ‘thought experiment’ feels more neutral. I think I might have been influenced by having read reviews of The Consciousness Company before the novel itself, most of which have overlap with how I would describe political dystopia: Imogen Edward-Jones, for example, called the novel a “call to action”, Stephen Fry describing it as addressing “the enormous ethical, metaphysical and existential waves threatening to engulf us”. Rosen’s mention of “expression through non-expression” struck me, because I had thought that perhaps the novel is not a dystopia, but a pre-dystopia: larger consequences of the company are foreshadowed, but not fully realised. Rosen himself liked ‘pre-dystopia’ and agreed this is how the novel might be described. Rosen commented that his novel “definitely hints at it, because we all know what utopia looks like” – if we go to the ‘Ethics Committee’, a chapter in the novel about the committee employed to regulate The Consciousness Company and who visualise the ideal output of the company. To Rosen, it seemed that the key issue his novel addressed was ‘the notion of identity’, which ‘goes to the core of what our society is’. Rosen mentioned that the economic framework of impact businesses and their tokenism is something he is concerned about: “[the] identification of risk factors is really important, but the problem is that essentially you’re operating within really only an economic framework. Okay, there are laws we have today, but regulation and thinking haven’t found their way into structures that then regulate companies, and investors, who are looking for increases in profitability, are not incentivised. Some of us try to act against our social incentive to the best we can, but investors are following the rules they’ve been given, and companies are existing within these economic frameworks and the rules they’ve been given. They’ll have an ethics committee, because they will have all these cases being thrown up, and they need a mechanism to look into them and say “this is what we’re doing’[…] but it’s never going to have, in the current set-up, the power of affecting the company missions and visions. And you see that in ‘The Prospectus Drafting Session’ [final chapter of the novel] – that’s, by the way, based on on my experience of sitting in huge boardroom tables with a great cast of characters – good, intelligent people in their disciplines, but they’ve each got their role […] the company itself comes to that meeting and says ‘you know this is a major problem’ and all the lawyers can do is say ‘yes, yes — wonderful, we’ll work that in, could cause the end of the world, just write it down in the prospectus and then we’re done”. That definitely points to the dystopia – if we don’t get our act together and take these risks seriously, or find a framework for them”. Rosen’s dystopian elements are masterfully nuanced – he does not point an accusing finger at a company and call it heartless, but it seems he suggests that instead our society is stuck in a bureaucratic rut, wherein there is a lot of thinking about problems but no acting on them.

I was very interested by Rosen’s experience in the world of business, and his dissection of structural issues that become supranatural in scale and consequence. In his book, there are moments where one gets the sense that the ethical self-justification of the company is “if we don’t do this immoral thing someone else will” – the use of bureaucracy in mandating ethics means merely foreseeing the inevitable and acknowledging, but not preventing, it. Rosen expanded on how his experience informed this outlook: ‘Someone else will, already has – the kind of space race of technology is getting us into trouble […] technological development – the fact that we use that phrase implies progress, but [….] we don’t answer as a society the question of why the technologies we’re developing are necessarily beneficial.”

We revisited AI once more. I wanted to know whether Rosen worries about its impact on education, freedom of thought, literature, language, and other aspects of human life. This is, of course, very relevant in the wake of Oxford’s decision to make ChatGPT-5 accessible to all students, though my interview with Rosen slightly predated this announcement. Rosen described using AI to learn as akin to “playing the piano and a robot [pushing] down the keys”, and argued that using AI to avoid doing the foundational work for problem solving means that “you lose the ability to think, by going through that more painstaking process, you ask yourself questions, which build networks which you otherwise wouldn’t be able to build”. In Rosen’s line of work, the use of AI to run methods such as leveraging buyer models means that one cannot identify what has gone wrong if the model fails, as they will not be acquainted with the process, only the answers. In sum, AI seems to make us less competent. Rosen and I did, however, both agree that its innovations in medicine seem promising. 

Before we ended our interview, I asked Rosen what the one thing he would want people to take away from The Consciousness Company would be. Despite the clue being very much in the title, his answer surprised me – I was expecting something existential and cynical. We had not discussed ‘the existential dimension’ of the novel, but Rosen suggested that he would want his work to make people meditate, “if only in a ten-minutes-a-day way”. He referenced ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhardt Tolle and the philosophical argument for mindfulness – Rosen wants people “if even a little bit, to engage with their own consciousness, to be in their own lives and not sort of there but somewhere else”. I appreciated the way that Rosen and his writing seem to resist the extremist political pulls that our modern media seems to be setting as a trend – the sense that one must be non-relentingly, radically on one side of a debate or another. Much like his discussion of AI, I did not come away from this interview feeling panicked or enraged, but merely that Rosen recognises there are issues in society that need to be addressed and dissected. 

Rosen also mentioned that a new book is in the works for him, which will be similar in style – a novel about a technological development where there are concerns that the technology develops too much – but that this cannot be expected any time soon. The message that not all technological advancements are necessarily positive is a truly important one to be reiterated. 


My review of The Consciousness Company can be read here.

‘Extremely funny and emotionally intense’: ‘Your Funeral’ at the Burton Taylor Studio

Charlie Bailey
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‘Extremely funny and emotionally intense’: ‘Your Funeral’ at the Burton Taylor Studio

Your Funeral is Pharaoh Productions’ debut play written by Nick Samuel, about the last conversation that ex-partners Anna (Rebecca Harper) and Jeff (Matt Sheldon) have after Anna’s terminal leukaemia diagnosis. The production carried both humour and strong emotional performances, and while both characters were frustrating to watch at times, this added up to a convincing portrayal of the complexity of grief. 

Both actors gave stellar performances. Rebecca Harper lent Anna a vibrant incandescence that showed fractures in moments of self-doubt, leading to an eventual complete breakdown. Parts of the script where Anna’s illness became obvious (such as a moment where she is wracked by a coughing fit) were performed sensitively. Equally talented was Matt Sheldon’s interpretation of Jeff, a character both awkward and calculating. Sheldon’s portrayal gave the sense that Jeff had thought painstakingly about what to say to Anna, and was deeply frustrated by her refusal to take his thoughts seriously.

The most impressive aspect of Nick Samuel’s writing was how much comedy was incorporated throughout. Anna’s control of the characters’ dynamic was established immediately with the remark “do you remember when you thought I broke your back during sex?”, prompting some characteristic awkward shuffling from Jeff. Anna’s sarcastic remarks, well handled by Rebecca Harper, visibly reinforced Jeff’s insecurities throughout the play. The dialogue that I was least convinced by, though, was the more philosophical sections –for example, Jeff asking Anna what she was most proud of in her life, and Anna stating the obvious that her life was very short. However, given the subject matter of the play, I had expected more of that kind of introspection and was pleasantly surprised at the ability of the script to hold moments that were both extremely funny and emotionally intense.

The initial dialogue rendered Jeff deeply unlikeable, with a startling ability to make Anna’s death all about him. Sitting next to Anna on the sofa, he unashamedly began a sentence “when my dog died…”, provoking exasperated laughter from the audience. This turned into a long monologue about the way in which he grieved his dog, as some sort of blueprint for how he would like to grieve Anna, to which Anna said nothing and stared determinedly forward. This became a repetitive and effective dynamic: one of the actors telling a long story to prove a twisted point. It made the audience realise that Jeff was not acknowledging how important it was to Anna that she appear to him “completely fine”.  

At the start of the play, it was hard to understand why Jeff kept pushing Anna to admit that her own death scared her. When Anna was choosing to make light of the situation with jokes, his demand that she changed her emotions to reflect his own made him seem insensitive;it was as if he was seeking a perverse legitimation of his own grief. The initial dialogue was at times slightly repetitive due to this unsatisfying dynamic.

A key shift in how I viewed the characters was when Anna persuaded Jeff to have sex with her, only for him to pause before unzipping his fly, one of the only clear-minded things he said or did. It was the first window into how vulnerable Anna felt, which would be built on in later moments, such as in a tearful confession in which she admitted that she thought that if they had sex, he wouldn’t leave her. In this moment in particular, Harper’s acting shone. The shock of the intense onstage intimacy seemed to mark a point at which all of their interactions became more toxic and emotionally intense.

These outbursts of toxicity were where the play was at its best. The actors were skilled at retaining humour as the dialogue became more combative. The jokes themselves, while still funny, became more wounding: outraged by something Jeff said, Anna refers back to her unsuccessful attempt to make him sleep with her: “I wasn’t wet. I lied”. Jeff reacts manically to the words Anna used to order him to do something, suggesting he never loved her and, most disturbingly, that he will laugh knowing she’s on her deathbed. This damaged the audience’s opinion of him irreversibly. 

I questioned whether the script could have included more moments of tenderness between the two – but this seems impossible given the self-centred premise of Jeff’s character. Sheldon’s portrayal of Jeff gave the impression that he needed control of Anna: of her funeral, her memories of their relationship, and even her last moments. In a line so self-centred as to come across as bizarre, Jeff claims that real love means wanting someone next to you on your deathbed, and the fact that Anna denied him that by breaking up with him shows that she never really loved him. Many of Jeff’s lines are the epitome of missing the point: it’s because Anna loves him that she doesn’t want him there. However, it’s worth acknowledging that the play portrays the irrationality of grief, and Jeff’s character is used convincingly to take this to its extreme.

Jeff’s need for control was embodied in the way that ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’, the song that the script is based on, entered the dialogue. It seemed to represent another example of Jeff’s insecure attempts to assert his relevancy to Anna’s life, telling her that the line about “Anna’s ghost” refers to her. It was only on reflection that I realised how many of the song’s lyrics tied to moments in the play. For instance, “let me hold it close and keep it here with me” seems to refer to Jeff’s intent to remember their time together in a way that suits him. The childlike vulnerability of the need to keep Anna with him is shown onstage in moments such as that when he bleats “hold me”, and waits for Anna to come into his arms.

More perhaps could have been done with the set design, as the bareness of the stage meant that the actors were often standing up in intimate moments, which felt a bit unrealistic in the circumstances. At points, however, I thought the bare lighting and lack of elaborate stage design aided the painful awkwardness of moments such as Jeff’s refusal to have sex with Anna: in the bright lit, bare surroundings, there was nowhere to hide, reinforcing the bleakness of their failure to connect.

I left the production wishing the audience had seen more honesty from Anna’s character. Her ‘façade’ never fell away in a way that allowed her and Jeff to connect satisfactorily. This I think was intentional, showing the ability of the self-righteous emotions that we carry to obstruct vulnerability.

Review: Hill and Harmer’s A Life in Song – the strange world of Lieder

Francis Lee
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Review: Hill and Harmer’s A Life in Song – the strange world of Lieder

It’s time again for the Oxford Song Festival, which means a legion of top classical singers and musicians will be descending on Oxford for two weeks to sing (predominantly) centuries-old Lieder to an audience of those approaching the second century of their own lives. Other than their very favourable student rates, what are the young students of Oxford missing from the strange world of what used to be called the Oxford Lieder Festival? Two very impressive young musicians, Sebastian Hill and Will Harmer, displayed some of the answers last Friday in their performance A Life in Song.

A Lieder performance is a very strange thing, especially for those of us more used to a grand Romantic symphonic musical bath. The singer has to stand facing his audience and sing French or German poetry to a sedate piano backing, usually of quaint and florid love. The first song, ‘Heidenröslein’, written by Franz Schubert before his 21st birthday, saw our three talented young protagonists (a singer, a pianist, and the ghost of a composer) as earnest youths singing obediently to classical tunes on the conventions of love. Hill has a pure voice and Harmer a deft control, and both men harmoniously matched the earnest lightness which Schubert wrote into the piece. I was not, however, left with the impression that Hill, Harmer, or Schubert really were in love with any of the octogenarians to whom they were performing their song of love. All three were performing the stories and styles of others, and, pleasant and accomplished though it was, it was not overly engaging.

The pair also performed a couple of able compositions by Harmer himself. Likewise, they were poetry set to song and piano, but largely avoided the Lieder’s storytelling potential. Harmer’s premier piece ‘Wild Nights’ was stark and thematic but did not end satisfactorily. His excellent ‘Canción de Jinete’, with its shifting accompanying phrases in the piano sliding underneath the twisting modal vocal phrases, substituted story for mystery and then died away with one last fascinating phrase. The highlights of the concert for me, however, were a couple of the old Lieder, ‘Der Tambour’ by Hugo Wolf and ‘Lynceus der Thürmer’ by Carl Loewe.

‘Der Tambour’, placed in the middle-age portion of the life depicted through the programme, showed the mature confidence of composers and performers who were willing to imprint their own characters onto their works. Humorous and bizarre lines from the poet Eduard Möricke were expertly wrought into wry phrases by Wolf to tell in deprecating fashion the fears and desires (mostly a good wurst and a tankard of wine) of a boy soldier on campaign. Hill, his natural sense of humour plain to see, perfectly embodied the wry storytelling humour of Möricke and Wolf. After singing with relish of all the “Wurst” and “Hexen” in this peculiar delight, he won a well-deserved laugh from the audience.

The concert was not quite done before the turn of age and wisdom in ‘Lynceus der Thümer’ (or ‘Lynceus the Watchman’), which showcased the pathos of loss which is at the heart of the Lieder genre. The rich tone of Loewe’s writing, well-rendered in Hill’s pure yet powerful voice, and Harmer’s emotion-laden chords gave the beautiful backdrop necessary to convey the watchman’s moving story of the beauty of life as death approaches.

The best of Lieder provides an experience you cannot otherwise replicate – of poetry told across language through performance and music. I would recommend to anyone that they come and cast aside, as I did, their programme with its ready translation, and instead watch and listen to a strange but powerful art form which has captivated for centuries.

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