Friday, May 9, 2025
Blog Page 782

Blockbuster bust-up?

Alex Gabel and Angelica De Vido
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Blockbuster bust-up?

Ever since the omission of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight as a Best Picture contender in 2008, casual film lovers have wondered if mainstream films would ever receive an Academy Award for Best Picture (Alex Gabel writes). The Academy has since doubled the potential number of nominees to a maximum of 10 films, providing some breathing room for non-‘Oscar bait’ nominees. For instance, last year’s Arrival earned a Best Picture nomination, joining a sparse list of sci-fi nominees including Inception, Avatar, and Star Wars. Given the crop of high quality blockbusters this year, can any of them go all the way and win the Oscar for Best Picture?

Blade Runner 2049 (from Arrival director Denis Villeneuve) already has an excellent chance at the technical awards (with longtime Oscar-nominee Roger Deakins looking like he’ll finally win Best Cinematography for his jaw-dropping imagery), but its heartfelt story and great performances could put it in contention for Best Picture or Director.

Other mainstream movies attracting significant Oscar buzz include Nolan’s own Dunkirk, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Nolan’s exceptional track record at creating award-friendly films that mainstream audiences love makes Dunkirk almost a lock this point. Get Out and Wonder Woman may end up buried beneath the vast number of more traditional awards contenders not yet on wide release. Depending on how many of these late-year releases the Academy deems worthy, either Get Out or Wonder Woman could receive major nominations. Get Out is probably the favourite of the two, due to its its fresh and unique portrayal of racial tensions in modern society. But I would personally prefer Patty Jenkins to be nominated for Best Director instead, especially after being shortlisted for Time magazine’s person of the year as “the director redefining how the world sees women”.

Some other popular films could make the list too. Logan provided a drastic change of tone from the usual superhero fare, with many calling it this year’s Dark Knight. It’s a truly remarkable post-apocalyptic western which seems likely to receive a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Patrick Stewart, if anything. Baby Driver lost the little amount of buzz it had following Kevin Spacey’s fall from grace, but you never know: with a director like Rian Johnson (Looper, Brick), even Star Wars: The Last Jedi has the potential to win big awards.

 

Moonlight’s success at the last Academy Awards, as the first Best Picture winner to focus on queer African American experience, made last year’s ceremony one for the history books, (Angelica De Vido writes). The 2017 awards season also celebrated an array of other stories which centred on the lives of ethnically diverse protagonists – from the standout Fences and Hidden Figures, to the moving dramas Lion and Loving.

However, the question now remains whether this year’s award season will maintain this momentum, and provide a more diverse offering than the previous controversial #oscarssowhite years.

Among the top contenders for 2018 Best Picture nominations, there is definite trend of movies moving away from the traditional heteronormative white male narrative that dominates mainstream cinema – queer love stories in Call Me By Your Name and Battle of the Sexes; explorations of class in I, Tonya and The Florida Project; and a number of films with fantastic female leads including Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Nominations for Get Out or The Big Sick could also provide a shake-up to the prevalence of ‘white’ narratives among the Best Picture pack.

In addition to Best Picture, questions also remain regarding who will be nominated for Best Director – another category that has historically witnessed an extreme lack of diversity. Will any female directors be in the running this year? The top contenders against the barrage of male directors include Greta Gerwig (for the “100% on Rotten Tomatoes” standout Lady Bird) and Sofia Coppola (for The Beguiled), or indeed even Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins. Shamefully, despite Kathryn Bigelow’s glass-ceiling-shattering Best Director win in 2010, no woman has since received even a nomination, yet alone a win. However, with the strong field of female directors entering the fray this year (including Bigelow herself for the magnificent Detroit), there is a chance that this male dominance will be challenged for the first time in almost a decade.

A central reason is that the Academy’s prior make-up of largely white, male voters, who continued to vote for films about protagonists who are ‘just like them’, has been challenged due to a recent increase in Academy membership by women and people from a range of ethnic backgrounds. Hopefully, this much-needed shake-up will be reflected in the diversity of nominations, and the Academy will recognise the range of brilliant films that explore human experience in all its richness, complexity and diversity.

Oxford Council orders emergency shelter for the homeless

Greg Ritchie
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Oxford Council orders emergency shelter for the homeless

Oxford City Council has invoked its Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) for rough sleepers, following forecasts of snow and sub-zero temperatures.

The decision, made in consultation with the St Mungo’s and Homeless Oxfordshire charities, will ensure local homelessness organisations make extra bed spaces available for rough sleepers.

Emergency accommodation will be provided to anyone who would otherwise be sleeping rough at night, even if they would not usually be eligible through the city’s adult homelessness pathway.

The council has alerted The Porch, A2Dominion and other providers that work alongside St Mungo’s and Homeless Oxfordshire that SWEP has been invoked. It shall remain active until Monday.

During SWEP, the council recommends that rough sleepers and support agencies acting on their behalf should contact O’Hanlon House, a homeless hostel in the city, to make arrangements for access.

Councillor Mike Rowley, Board Member for Housing, said: “We are invoking SWEP because it will be freezing…and we have a humanitarian obligation to do everything we can to prevent serious harm – or worse – to homeless people on the city’s streets.

“I’d like to thank the volunteers and professionals involved in the SWEP operation for their efforts in helping rough sleepers into emergency accommodation.”

Alex Kumar, chair of Oxford SU’s ‘On Your Doorstep’ homelessness campaign, told Cherwell: “What will happen this weekend under SWEP is a great and beautiful thing, for which we can thank the council and the volunteers and professionals involved. Human lives – that otherwise might have been lost – will be saved.

“But let us not be mistaken: with homelessness now at the level of crisis on the streets of Oxford, SWEP is the floor – not the ceiling – of what needs to happen. After all, when you’re out on the street, you’re so vulnerable. Forget three consecutive freezing nights – sometimes, it takes just one cold night to kill you.

“Imagine if SWEP were invoked every time temperatures dropped below zero, or even extended indefinitely – if all our city’s rough sleepers who will be given temporary shelter this weekend were allowed to stay there for as long as they need, with both the protection from danger and the opportunity for improvement that you really struggle to find when you’re sleeping rough.

“Let us imagine these things – and ask, ‘why not?'”

Oxford recently lost one of its homeless shelters – Lucy Faithfull House – after funding cuts. Plans for a new centre on Rymers Lane are currently under way.

Oxford student who stabbed boyfriend appeals sentence

Oscar Baker
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Oxford student who stabbed boyfriend appeals sentence

Oxford University student Lavinia Woodward has filed an appeal against the suspended prison sentence she received in September for drunkenly stabbing her boyfriend in the leg with a bread knife.

Woodward was convicted of unlawful wounding, and given a 10 month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, by presiding judge Ian Pringle QC at Oxford Crown Court. She has applied to the Court of Appeal to review her sentence.

A spokesman for the Judicial Press Office told Cherwell: “Lavinia Woodward has submitted an application for permission to appeal. The next stage is for a single judge to consider the application on paper and if permission is granted it then the substantive appeal will be heard in court before three judges.”

The attack by the Christ Church medical student took place in December 2016 when her partner , a Cambridge University student whom she had met on Tinder, was visiting Oxford.

In the initial trial, judge Ian Pringle QC stated, “It seems to me that if this was a one-off, a complete one-off, to prevent this extraordinarily able young lady from not following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to would be a sentence which would be too severe.”

Whilst Woodward’s lawyer, James Sturman QC, said these comments were later misunderstood and treated out of context, they led to accusations of judicial leniency and inequality, with Woodward being branded “too clever” for prison.

John Azah, chief executive of the Kingston Race and Inequalities Council, told The Daily Telegraph at the time: “If she wasn’t Oxford-educated, if she came from a deprived area, I don’t think she would have got the same sentence and been allowed to walk free.”

Whilst passing sentence, however, Pringle noted that there were “many mitigating features” which led to the judgment. He also noted that, “You have demonstrated over the last nine months that you are determined to rid yourself of your alcohol and drug addiction and have undergone extensive treatment including counselling to address the many issues that you face”.

Pringle had deferred Woodward’s sentence for four months earlier in the year to allow for such an opportunity to show good behaviour. She has attended a drug and alcohol clinic and received care for an eating disorder.

Woodward, an aspiring heart surgeon, voluntarily suspended her studies at Oxford but could still return. Three complaints against the presiding judge Ian Pringle were dismissed on the grounds they did not concern his personal conduct.

The Death of Stalin review – ‘it straddles that oh-so-narrow line between repellent and comic’

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The Death of Stalin review – ‘it straddles that oh-so-narrow line between repellent and comic’

Near to the beginning of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) is distributing the names of all those who are to be arrested that night. Authoritative and mildly bored, he points out one name and says to kill “her first but make sure he sees it,” in a moment of weary professionalism, a microcosmic representation of the absurd horror which fuels the film’s comedy.

It shouldn’t be funny, but in the hands of Beale and Iannucci, it straddles that oh-so-narrow line between repellent and comic, between jaw-droppingly awful and gut-bustingly amusing. In the cinema I was in, there were shocked splutters, followed by laughter.

Iannucci, lead writer of cult British comedy The Thick of It and the first four seasons of Veep, takes his brand of comedy, one fuelled by escalating political insanity, relentless narrative momentum and an absolute ton of swearing, and mixes it with the elevated stakes of Stalinist Moscow. Instead of media outcry following a public scandal, the characters are faced with the constant risk of death. Instead of low-level ministers and civil servants, the core cast is comprised of the most powerful individuals in the USSR. The resulting concoction is intoxicating.

The trappings of his style transfer remarkably well to this heightened scenario. While they occupy the summit of Soviet political life, his characters are never in control of events. Instead, they are hemmed in by the legacy of Stalin, by their loyalty to the party, and by the machinations of their colleagues. They scuttle around, plotting and counter-plotting, cocking up and righting course, endlessly reacting to wild shifts in the balance of power. This instability makes the film tick, it lends every scene a boundless energy propelling it forwards.

This is complemented by tight writing. In one meeting of the Central Committee, every vote is passed unanimously because no-one wants to vote against the party. Their hands go up, one by one, like a bureaucratic Mexican wave, in what is a masterful display of comic pacing. Meanwhile, the prolonged, futile struggle between Stalin’s alcoholic son, Vasily (Rupert Friend), and a guard lasts so long that it goes from being funny, to unfunny, to funny all over again; the camera never once looks away and the background acting of the ensemble is given time to shine.

The cast is incredible. Devoid of any weak links, they sell the heightened reality of those fateful days in the wake of Stalin’s death. Particular praise must go to Beale and Jason Isaacs: Beale for his fusion of menace and humour, Isaacs’s for his rough-and-ready take on General Zhukov. Nevertheless, the film is always aware of the bleakness of its material, and never shies away from it. Beria is shown to be a sexual predator, his interactions with the main cast inflected by our knowledge of his abusive proclivities.

As the plot reaches its denouement, everything just stops being funny. There’s still the shouting and swearing and absurd leaps of logic, but it’s no longer amusing. Somewhere, almost imperceptibly, the film shifts gears, and its final moments are brutal and unsettling and impossible to forget. The Death of Stalin takes something which has no right to be funny and transforms it into comedy gold, driven by its own warped logic which has been moulded by the instability at the heart of the plot.

The Death of Stalin is excellently written, brilliantly cast, and soul-crushingly funny. Get out, and watch it this very instant.

How To: Survive Oxmas

Honor Brocklebank-Fowler
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How To: Survive Oxmas

As seventh week arrives and we all surrender to the inevitable zombie-like exhaustion, Scrooge’s words can seem more pertinent than ever: “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?” However, the trick to surviving, if not thriving, during Oxmas is recognising that even if discernible reasons to be merry are a bit thin on the cobbled ground, we all have the right to enjoy ourselves after weeks of gruelling term time.

The first and most crucial tactic for getting through Oxmas is to engage in mental time travel, or at least intense wilful ignorance. Accept the fact that a college Christmas tree is up, and that Hall is serving inexcusable numbers of brussel sprouts and soggy Christmas pudding over a month before the big day.

It is worth highlighting here how uniquely Oxonian (read: illogical and freakish) these premature festivities are. Nowhere else in the country are the not-so mellifluous tones of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ so universally audible, from the cheese floor of Park End to the depressing shops of Westgate – although, let’s face it, they’ve been decked up in festive trimming since their opening in October.

My second tip, although admittedly this may be one more for the girls and anyone identifying as such, is to find any and all festive formal events, and shamelessly exploit this opportunity for sequins and red lipstick. Let’s be honest, gratuitous formal events (and the consequent Instagram material) are the USP of an Oxbridge education.

When academic zeal fails you, and you find yourself crying over the Shmoop summary of Paradise Lost and an unsympathetic cup of Mug Shot instant pasta, put your name down for as many Oxmas formal dinners as you can find within a one-mile radius. Then, spend whatever remains of your student loan (for me, this is a humble £6.20) on a glittery ASOS mini dress. It doesn’t matter if you only attend a single guest formal with incredibly disappointing prosecco: there is always next November!

Poirot’s enduring appeal

Raffaella Sero
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Poirot’s enduring appeal

Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express must be at least the third adaptation I have seen of the famous novel. It seemed to me that, while the Belgian detective’s little quirks had been picked on and exaggerated by previous television efforts, all of the real charm of a Poirot mystery had been sacrificed to the construction of a flashier, rather incredible and perhaps more popular sort of character, a character who was not Hercule Poirot.

Nevetheless, I soon discovered that I was wrong. It was a tiny detail in Branagh’s performance that gave me hope as to the insight his new adaptation could offer into one of Christie’s masterpiece. For, all through the film, Branagh’s eyes had the right sparkle.

In the books, Poirot’s small eyes are of great importance. They are always full of expression shrewd and vigilant, and the light that animates them is often secret knowledge, a private joke.

This knowledge often corresponds with the solution of the crime at hand, and the joke is invariably on Hastings, or on whoever, including the reader, is witnessing Poirot’s display of genius.

There is indeed something incredibly satisfying in an Agatha Christie mystery, at least when one uses one’s ‘little grey cells’ and gets the solution right. John Curran, the editor of Christie’s notebooks, ascribes her long-lasting, boundless popularity to the fact that: “No other crime writer did it so well, so often or for so long; no one else matched her combination of readability, plotting, fairness and productivity”.

While all these elements are certainly true, and would be enough to grant any author eternal fame, however, they are not the only things that appeal to us in Christie.

They are the mechanics of her greatness, its sinews and bones – they are not its heart and soul. Similarly, one is usually given the impression that, behind the little sparkle in Poirot’s eyes, there is something more than the solution to a problem, something more than the frantic working of his ‘little grey cells’ and the serene application of ‘order an method’.

Indeed, all through his series of exploits, there is some greater, deeper secret ‘papa Poirot’ is in the knowledge of: that is the secret of understanding life and its power, as much as murder and its appeal.

There is a real appreciation of life in Poirot’s characters. It is something that goes beyond the mere insight in human nature that is essential for the solving of all Christie’s mysteries. When I first started reading Christie, I pledged my full devotion to Miss Marple over Poirot. Indeed, the extraordinary working of her mind is something she certainly shares with Poirot.

A crucial aspect, however, that differentiates Miss Marple from Poirot, is that while both revel in solving crime, the sweet old lady genuinely enjoys pointing her wrinkled finger towards those who have committed it; for Miss Marple, that justice will be served is as crucial as that the murder should be solved. Not so for Hercule Poirot, who believes in the existence of good and evil, but who also understands compassion.

This is not to say that Poirot would ever let a criminal go unpunished, but he does recognize that there are many more diverse layers to justice than Miss Marple would ever notice. In 4.50 from Paddington, the unyielding old lady regrets the fact that death penalty is no longer available for punishing the abominable murderer she has just exposed. By contrast, Poirot, more than once, mercifully allows his murders the shortcut of suicide. This ability to recognize the complexity of the world, to hate the murder and, at the same time, feel pity for the perpetrator, stems from his joie de vivre.

In An Autobiography, Christie writes: “Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy of being alive … there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life.” This true enjoyment of life is present as an undercurrent in all of Christie’s most enduring successes, and perhaps her greatest mystery.

Rusbridger fails in bid to keep painting of murdered model at LMH

Emily Lawford
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Rusbridger fails in bid to keep painting of murdered model at LMH

Alan Rusbridger, the principal of Lady Margaret Hall, tried unsuccessfully to raise £8,000 to keep a painting of a murdered Irish model at the college. The painting was sold at auction in Oxford today for £6,500.

The former Guardian editor set up a JustGiving page on Wednesday to prevent the painting being sold away from the college. However, in the two days since the petition was launched, just £80 was raised.

Rusbridger told Cherwell: “I only heard about the painting being auctioned two days ago and it was always going to be a very tall order to crowdfund the money within that time.

“It would have been lovely to have had it on public view at LMH. We gave it a go but sadly time wasn’t on our side and the moment has passed.”

William Strang’s portrait depicts Eileen ‘Dolly’ Henry, an Irish model who was murdered in 1914 by her lover, the artist John Currie.

On his JustGiving page, Rusbridger wrote that the painting can “serve as a resource to reflect on sexual violence, obsession, the role of the ‘muse’ and changing ideas of female sexuality”.

He added that it seemed fitting for the painting to hang at Lady Margaret Hall, the first college to admit women.

Rusbridger said Currie was Henry’s “on-off boyfriend”, and abused the model until she escaped to London.

Currie stalked her to her new Chelsea apartment, spent the night with her, and then shot her.

All That Fall review – ‘Powerful and perturbing, with something of the uncanny about it’

Sam Rice
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All That Fall review – ‘Powerful and perturbing, with something of the uncanny about it’

All That Fall seems like an ambitious choice for directors Nicole and Sonny. The Beckett Estate had insisted it was only to be performed as a radio-play, a request that, amazingly, was circumvented by blindfolding the audience. We are listeners then, eavesdropping on the bleak journey Maddie takes to and from the train station in Boghill, a fictional town in Ireland. The accents are impeccable, bringing each character to life in Beckett’s unusually naturalistic play.

The play starts with Maggie, brilliantly played by Miranda Mackay, panting and groaning across the traverse stage. ‘Oh if you had my eyes… the things they have seen… this is nothing’ she cries out, her voice raised yet always feeble. This is whilst a whole series of villagers come and go, all too pre-occupied with their own lives to notice or care for her deep-set sadness. Jonathan Berry plays Christy, a carter, with alacrity as he tries to sell her dung. Mr Tyler (Patrick Orme) frustratedly tells her of his broken bicycle, and Tommy (Christian Edwards) receives a blow from Mr Barrell (Daniel Cummings) in a confusing scene of busy hysteria.

Punches in the stomach and a broken bicycle contribute to the sense that the characters’ worlds are slowly decaying.  Mr Rooney, played by Fred Lynam, powerfully laments that he has lost his sight, a line which takes on a new significance to the blindfolded audience. It feels exposing, the decrepitude of Beckett’s world suddenly becoming all too real.

In the absence of a setting, sounds became the stage-props, and it is exciting when these then became artistic statements in their own right. The hotchpotch of farm animals that come through the speakers is deliciously overdramatic. A staff is passed around by the characters; sometimes alerting the audience to where they are positioned, and at others creating a wall of cross-rhythms that is all-encompassing.

The arrival of a train comes during the play’s central climax. A wall of surround-sound envelopes the audience; voices are shushing repeatedly, whistles are blowing and a dramatic audio blares through the speakers, before opening up into the bustle of a market scene. The space is utilised and my ear is overtaken with a polyphony of sounds. Here I really appreciate the decision to adapt the script from a radio to a stage play.

Sometimes, however, a lack of energy and pace leaves sections feeling half-baked. Perhaps there was a particularly square audience tonight, but the absence of laughter was noticeable in a play intended as dryly humorous.

From Miss Fitt’s affected piousness at church, to Mr Slocum and Mrs Rooney’s innuendo-filled exchange, Beckett frequently invites the audience to laugh at the absurdity of his characters. ‘I’m coming, Mrs. Rooney, I’m coming, give me time’, Mr Slocum cries, coming round to extract Maddie from the driver’s seat of his car. The intense focus on the tragic elements of this play, however, doesn’t leave room for these much-needed moments of comic relief, which are largely unfelt.

Yet this is a minor point in an otherwise ambitious and successful play. I met the directors before the opening night. Nicole had watched a performance of Not I in London last year. The darkness of the auditorium, the pace of the monologue, and the terrifying intensity of a single pair of lips smacking together within a wall of blackness had transfixed her. Their own production is similarly powerful and perturbing, with something of the uncanny about it. I left feeling strangely disorientated, and a feeling of being off-kilter that took a few minutes to shake off.

The strange death of Constable’s rural idyll

Daniel Villar
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The strange death of Constable’s rural idyll

We often look to the British countryside as a place of solace. In a forever changing world, the countryside is a place where things remain still – where hardworking men with calloused hands labour from the cock’s morning crow until the sun’s western farewell, where the problems of modern Britain seem distant.

Urbanites might even remark that some patch of the countryside resembles the paintings of Gainsborough or Constable. Yet a passing glimpse of one of those paintings will show us how wrong we are to imagine that the land in rural England has remained constant. Look at John Constable’s The Cornfield (1826), and you will see a landscape unlike any that survives in Britain today.

The Cornfield is a particularly apt painting for discussing the changes in the British countryside since the advent of the industrial revolution. It depicts a boy leading sheep down a dirt path, stopping for a moment to take a drink from neighbouring stream. Above him tower mighty elms, and on the other side of the dirt path there is a hedgerow which demarcates the end of a field out of frame.

In the background is a farmer with his plow, working in the titular cornfield. The whole scene is the picture of unchanging rural idyll. And yet today no such landscape exists. Look at a modern British landscape, and you will see no elms, and rarely a hedgerow. Even the shape and structure of the cornfield will be radically different.

Let’s begin with the elms. Most British landscape paintings from before 1900 feature a treescape dominated by elms. Far more than the beech, ash, and oak with which we associate our rural woodland today, elm was the British tree. Yet today you hardly see any elms. Indeed in Britain, elms are a conservation priority. Over 90% of all elm trees in Britain died in the span of only a few decades, due to one invasive fungus from China.

This fungus causes Dutch elm disease, which blocks the xylem from moving nutrients up the elm, killing it. In elms’ place, trees which are more familiar to us – such as oaks – have grown, and your average British countryman would likely be unable to point out his nearest elm.

Hedgerows are often seen as being a quintessential part of the British countryside. These strips of hedge have delineated fields from each other for millennia, and in that time have evolved a unique ecosystem. Many birds and butterflies have evolved to be obligate on hedgerows, unable to live anywhere save this artificially constructed environment. The last half-century has seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of hedgerows found in Britain, and with it a decline in those species which rely on hedgerows.

This change in the landscape is a byproduct of the Green Revolution, when farming became properly industrial. Farms grew in size, and with that growth came the removal of the hedgerows separating fields. But more devastating for the hedgerows was the growth of fencing. Aided by government subsidies to modernise British farming, and driven by a new industrial profit driven mode of production, hedgerows across Britain have been torn down to make way for more efficient, but less ecologically useful, fences.

Farming itself has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000, a product of the Green Revolution and the widespread use of scientific methods in agriculture. Of course, in the early 20th century, the sort of hand-driven plough that we see in The Cornfield had long disappeared, but the principles of farming hadn’t changed. The growth of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides, as well as scientific breeding, has changed all that.

Our crops are more uniform than they would have been in Constable’s day. Our corn grows in straighter lines, and requires less tilling, meaning that we are getting more food for less manpower. Even the structure of the soil has changed with industrial agriculture, killing off native communities of micro-arthropods, earthworms, and fungi in favour of bacterial monocultures.

Look at The Cornfield again. Is it still that unchanging rural idyll that you see as you drive between Oxford and London? Or is it a bygone era, with a flora and a fauna unlike any which we see in modern Britain? Less than two centuries separate us from The Cornfield, yet it is unlike any cornfield you will see in Great Britain today.

Fire started by welder at Radcliffe Science Library

Libby Cherry
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Fire started by welder at Radcliffe Science Library

A fire that broke in the Radcliffe Science Library was started by an independent contractor carrying out welding work, the RSL has confirmed.

The fire – which begun in the Plant Room – was quickly contained, and students allowed to return to the building after an evacuation.

A spokesman for the library told Cherwell: “The welder stayed behind for ‘fire watch’ after completing the work, for reassurance that nothing had been ignited by the hot particles produced during welding.

“During fire watch a large quantity of smoke started issuing from a nearby cavity and was seen immediately. The contractor tried to stop the fire with a CO2 extinguisher but when this was not successful they activated the fire alarm.”

While the fire did not spread beyond the RSL’s Plant Room, the entire building was evacuated.

Melissa Talbot, a first year physicist who had been studying in the library, said: “We didn’t see any fire. We were super confused.”

Fire service crews quickly extinguished the blaze and, after an hour, students and staff were permitted to return.

No one in the building was harmed and there was no damage to either the collections or the Plant Room.

The RSL has stated it “remains committed to its current fire safety arrangements, and sees no reason to alter the current system”.

A spokesperson said: “The RSL has a fire risk assessment which is reviewed regularly. The safety arrangements for this work were suitable and sufficient, and the contractor followed them entirely correctly.”

Although disruption to students was minimal, some were not prepared to see their trip to the library rendered futile.

Student Arthur Morris said: “I got there as the fire engines arrived, then went back after about 20 minutes and had to find my book whilst the alarms were still going off”.

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