review Archives - Cherwell

Academia is hell, literally: R.F. Kuang’s ‘Katabasis’

R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis touches on a range of near-universal academic experiences: impostor syndrome; frantic, caffeine-fuelled study sessions; watching someone effortlessly ace every single test...

Netflix’s city of dreaming Americans: My Oxford Year, reviewed

If not taken too seriously, Netflix’s new movie My Oxford Year is a surprisingly good time, despite its cliché storyline. The rom-com, starring Sofia...

Jacob Collier is on scintillating form at Love Supreme

Despite being a seven-time Grammy Award winner, it was only at the 2025 Love Supreme Festival in Glynde that Jacob Collier had his first...

‘Pour summer in a glass’: retracing Dandelion Wine

“You did not hear them coming. You hardly heard them go. The grass bent down, sprang up again. They passed like cloud shadows downhill...

Review: Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light – “A new sensation”

There is a new sensation at Christ Church Drama Society, and it is called Wolf Hall. Adapted from the novel trilogy by Hilary Mantel,...

Running on treadmills: Milan Kundera’s meditations on Slowness

Sometimes it takes a new word to express an old feeling. Until the age of around fourteen I spent many of my evenings brokering...

What the book you’re reading says about you

In an institution as prestigious as Oxford, every book you pull out in public is transformed into a portable personality test, a hard launch...

Review – The Wykehamist: ‘A Saltburn for the other place’

In the underbelly of Hong Kong, a Goldsmith-Sachs Vice President invites a woman back to his penthouse apartment for sex. Once there, he tortures...

The Journal of a Chambermaid: The greatest novel you’ve never heard of

It is easy to suppose that the greatest authors of the 19th century have all already been discovered. Especially when it comes to French...

Sally Rooney, a Flaubert for today?

Like millions of other people in recent years, I have fallen victim to the ongoing Sally Rooney craze. The Irish author, whose novels have...

Anselm Kiefer: Early Works Review

I still remember the first time I saw Anselm Kiefer’s work. I was in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and I’d been stumbling around the...

Review: Suddenly Last Summer – ‘Cannibalism, love, and lobotomies’

This week at the Burton Taylor Studio, a new rendition of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is a feast for the eyes and the...

Review: The Boys by Leo Robson – ‘Sparkling, enjoyable, sad’

There is a passage in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943) in which an insurance agent, warming up to defraud his company and murder...

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

Jack The Ripper is arguably the most famous killer of the Victorian era. There is a fanatical fascination with his case. He is a...

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