Society

Difficult, I know, to spend your life dreaming of having gone to Oxford. This year’s offers have just been announced and Cambridge’s are imminent. I feel for those who miss out, but I have some words of comfort. My late mother told me I announced my desire to study at Oxford aged seven, visiting the city on a family day trip. My earliest memories of the university, though, came from books: those whose dust jackets announced the name of the author’s college – especially when they mentioned taking a First. My luck was in coming to understand that the Oxford I longed for was always fictional Books open a world

One of the worst ways to form a good first impression of someone is when they’re chasing the same woman as you, so in the interests of total clarity I’ll divulge that the first – and only – time I met Neil Gaiman was way back in the twentieth century, at the Groucho Club, when we were both after the late Kathy Acker. (I wanted to hurl when he called her ‘Tweetie Pie’.) I’ll tell my Acker story first because it’s a funny one. That Christmas she was a guest at a lunch at my bohemian in-laws. My second husband’s mother had failed to turn the stove on, thanks to an

Will we ever tire of the Cambridge spies? Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – and to a lesser extent John Caincross, the fifth man in the circle – are names as familiar to us now as certain brands of detergent or the line-up of the Beatles. To compliment the countless books, dramas and documentaries about them, this week the national archives declassified MI5 files on the subject. They cover Philby’s recruitment and subsequent flight to Moscow, as well as the Queen’s nine-year unawareness that Blunt (who worked for Buckingham Palace) had confessed to his past as a Soviet agent. It seems that whatever we think of Burgess, Maclean

OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say ‘slept with’ but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in Nottingham but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of the occasion by uploading a video of the aftermath, where she walks the streets with her face covered in what appears to be a pot pourri of male ejaculate. The reason Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect If the 25-year-old

I turned to Xiaohongshu during the pandemic. At a time when I couldn’t visit China, the Chinese social media app (also known as ‘RedNote’) was a little slice of the motherland when I was bored with Instagram or Twitter. I was hooked immediately: like Instagram, the app is good for beautiful pictures and well-produced reels. It also has cute animals and an excellent sample of the dry wit of Chinese millennials. I’ve probably swiped through hours, maybe days, of short videos of beautiful street scenes from Chinese cities, vlogs from people who have swapped mega-cities for rural villages, cooking videos from all corners of the country, Mandarin comedy skits and