Oxford university

Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with ‘a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings’, and girls from sister schools, ‘fully recovered from eating disorders’. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert’s satirical touch still hits the mark about ‘the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal

Any consideration of Stefan Collini’s subject has surely to address a major recent issue. The academic study of English, both at school and university, has fallen away significantly, with the numbers opting for it greatly diminishing. Anecdotal evidence from even the most serious institutions suggests that many students are now finding previously accessible texts impossible to read or understand – because of their length (Charles Dickens), their complexity of meaning (Alexander Pope) or remote sensibility or politics (Joseph Conrad). Collini has been given a generous amount of space to write his history. Despite this, he has chosen to end it more than 50 years ago. His subtitle is quite misleading.

There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and riddled with suburban self-consciousness – a kind of complicated awareness of his non-posh failings and resulting subtle superiority. He meets another young man – possibly gay – who is posh. An intricate dance ensues of social slip-ups and huge townhouses in Notting Hill, bags of money and country piles. It’s a formula which can be transposed between Edwardian drawing rooms and 1980s parties with only the slightest changes. Sometimes our protagonist is the aristocrat himself; sometimes he even went to Cambridge. He’s always cultured – interested in poetry, theatre and

Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick. Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to

There’s a beautiful moment in I Am the Secret Footballer (2012), a Guardian column turned whistle-blower memoir, when the anonymous author is momentarily freed from an enveloping depression caused by his career as a professional sportsman. He’s at Anfield to play against Liverpool in one of the biggest games of the season when he picks up a pristine, unused football before a warm-up drill and, inexplicably, sniffs it. With that inhalation he’s transported from the corruption, pressure, scandalous abuse and monstrous egos of elite sport and for a few seconds becomes a kid uncontainably excited at the prospect of kicking a new ball around his council estate. This Proustian reverie,

Practice is a short novel set in a ‘narrow room’: one day in the life of an Oxford undergraduate writing an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Annabel is trying to ‘perfect her routine, to get more out of each day’. She goes to bed early and rises at 6 a.m. She makes coffee like it’s a ritual and drinks it from the same small, brown mug. She has a plan. She will work, walk, do yoga, meditate, each at their allotted time. The restriction of the novel – a single day, a single character, discrete passages strung together like a sonnet sequence – lends itself to a delicate portrait of Annabel’s