Oxford

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What does the Oxford vaccine approval mean for the UK?

This morning the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the UK medicines regulator, the MHRA. This is almost more of a game changer than the approval of the first Pfizer vaccine, because the UK government has ordered 100 million doses of it – and it is also much easier to distribute, as it does not need to be stored at the same very low temperatures as the Pfizer jab. It means that there really is a chance of life returning to normal in the not-too distant future. Ministers had been very clear in private that if this immunisation didn’t pass, it would mean society would have to work out how to

Thursday

Tanya Gold

This replica is better than the original: The Ivy Oxford Brasserie reviewed

Oxford is not an easy city to homogenise; but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. I found a vast shopping centre where the Westgate used to be, looking as shopping centres do: lonely, despite its similarity to every other shopping centre. This was confirmed by the signage. New York City loves and misses you, said a sign, which I doubt: surely New York has things to worry about beyond the citizens of Oxford being unable to shop in New York City if they cannot get what they want at the Westgate? Still, I like the idea of shopping centre lamenting shopping centre across the ocean; it expresses the fashionable neurosis

Monday

Kate Andrews

The vaccine goalposts have shifted

Matt Hancock provided a vaccine update on Monday, explaining that the chances of a drug being ready by early next year are ‘looking up’. With trials pending in the UK, USA and Brazil, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be approved this year, although the Health Secretary he conceded it would more likely come in spring 2021. He added that doses are already being manufactured so that it will be ready to roll-out the moment it does receive approval.  We’ve heard this all before. At the height of lockdown, Oxford professor Sarah Gilbert – head of one of the teams developing the vaccine – told the Times that a vaccine would be ready by September: ‘It’s not

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed

Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is largely due to its central character, John Dyer, a former journalist in his late fifties, who has returned from years in South America to live in Oxford and write a book about Portugal’s accidental discovery of Brazil. With him comes his 11-year-old son, who attends the Phoenix, a posh prep school based on Oxford’s real-life Dragon School. Gradually, through a series of leisurely flashbacks, we learn that the love of Dyer’s life has died, his wife has left him, journalism has lost its soul and Brazil is going to pot.

Friday

Steerpike

Oxford college fails to get in the mood for Brexit day

It’s finally Brexit day, but while some are celebrating, others are finding it hard to get into the mood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Britain’s departure from the EU isn’t going down well in Oxford. As well as flying an EU flag over the Town Hall today, the city is also holding a candlelight vigil for the EU later this evening. Students there are also getting into the spirit. Here’s a university lunch menu from today, sent over by Mr S’s mole at Mansfield College: Mr S fancies Out After 47 Years with a side of Farmers’ Subsidies…

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

What is a ‘tergiversation’?

Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It was because Washington Post columnist George Will had used it in a piece about the US senator Lindsey Graham. ‘During the government shutdown,’ he had written, ‘Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word — have amazed’. It might have been the precise word, but it has two meanings: one is ‘desertion or abandonment of a cause, apostasy’; the other is ‘shifting, shuffling, equivocation, prevarication’. Both are pejorative, taking the idea of turning one’s back on a principle, since the Latin for ‘back’ is tergum. From the context, Mr Wills

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

The lessons I learned at my Oxford gaudy

I went to a gaudy last weekend. Several British universities now host these splendid events; mine was at Worcester College, Oxford, from where I graduated in 1981 with a double third in mathematics. A gaudy is essentially a reunion weekend with knobs on. At Worcester they are blessedly free, which is great for paups like me who can enjoy the exceptionally good food and, particularly, wine with a huge stupid smile. (The only cost was £42 for a guest room for a night, and my God do you need that.) Gaudies typically occur for each year’s intake only every seven years, and when you get the invitation you need to

Thursday

Tanya Gold

It’s so easy to go mad in Oxford: Chiang Mai Kitchen reviewed

Oxford is a pile of medieval buildings filled with maniacs, and is therefore one of the most interesting places on earth. It is easy to go mad in Oxford — it’s the damp — or grow other worlds, like John Tolkien, whose Middle Earth, I suspect, was largely an emotional defence against the conversation at High Table. I found the cognitive dissonance between the landscape and its purpose so alarming, like finding David Cameron riding an Ent, that I went mad, and so know far less about Tudor foreign policy than I should. It was more awful than it sounds — that is youth’s anguish — and I could not,

Thursday

Toby Young

Why has Gary Lineker been appointed a visiting fellow at Oxford?

Congratulations to Gary Lineker OBE, who has just been appointed a visiting fellow to Lady Margaret Hall, an Oxford college. This coup was announced on Twitter earlier today by Alan Rusbridger, principal of LMH and ex-editor of the Guardian: Lineker is among nine new fellows appointed by LMH, with Emma Watson becoming an associate fellow, having served as a visiting fellow from 2016-19 “with particular emphasis on promoting gender equality and women’s rights”, according to the college’s press release. That’s Watson, not Lineker, who might have struggled to reconcile that with his refusal to take a pay cut as the BBC’s highest-paid star – he earns £1.75 million a year – to

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Spelling it out | 25 October 2018

Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Ashmolean last week, was a very rational boy of about seven and his proud mother. ‘I don’t believe in magic, witches or Father Christmas,’ he announced to the girl presiding over Room One. ‘Perhaps you’re spiritual but not religious,’ said the girl. The rational boy gave her the look she deserved. In that first room pride of place is given to a squat little silvered bottle with a hand-written label: ‘Obtained in 1915 from an old lady living in Hove, Sussex. She remarked: “and they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there’ll be

Thursday

Harry Mount

Bats in the belfry

As the wordy title of this book and the name of its author suggest, this is a faux-archaic, fogeyish journey around England’s oddest vicars. The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie is, though, the real thing: a young curate in the Church of England. Yes, he’s given to sometimes tiresome jocularity: he describes himself as ‘a Bon Viveur first and foremost, with a soupçon of Roguishness and Prodigality’. But, still, his essential thesis is right: the Church of England has produced some real oddballs in its time, and this is an entertaining gallop through several centuries’ worth of them. For 400 years after the Reformation, the Church of England was the ideal Petri

Wednesday

Karen Yossman

Oxford’s problem? The sorry state of British state schools

Never does the disdain for state education become more apparent than when the conversation turns to Oxford and Cambridge admissions. Not from the distinguished universities themselves, mind you, who, despite what the media might have you believe, welcome all applicants regardless of their background. But from our political classes, particularly those on the left, who seem to believe state school pupils are so universally hopeless they can’t get in without demanding the universities lower the bar. Politicians such as David Lammy, whose obsession with Oxbridge knows no bounds, demand changes to the Oxford and Cambridge admissions system – such as moving from collegiate to centralised admissions – because it is

Thursday

Robert Tombs

Universities challenged | 10 May 2018

British universities have serious problems. The recent strikes protesting against a sudden reduction in pension rights were unusually effective, and a symptom of wider discontent. Yet international comparisons invariably show our universities to be among the best in the world, and incomparably the best in the European Union. This apparent paradox is easily resolved: universities in other countries have problems too, and often worse. Our problems are serious nevertheless. On the material side, they include financial instability due to sometimes reckless expansion; the casualisation of the academic ‘profession’, especially at its junior level, with short-term contracts, subsistence pay and no career structure; a stupendous increase in the size, cost and

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

No, Oxford students haven’t removed Theresa May’s portrait

From the dreaming spires of Oxford this afternoon comes a potent combination of student censorship and fake news. A group of geographers had claimed victory on Twitter in a campaign to remove the portrait of Theresa May from the School of Geography and the Environment. May is an alumnus of that school, but the Not All Geographers campaign wanted to challenge this, and did so by sticking drawings and messages about the hostile environment around the picture until it was removed. ‘We are pleased to announce that the @theresa_may portrait has been removed from @oxfordgeography!’ the geographers announced. Unfortunately, this wasn’t for the reasons that they claimed: a spokesman for

Thursday

Peter Hitchens

Missed connection

To me, the strange words ‘Marsh Gibbon’ once meant I was nearly home. My heart lifted as we creaked and shuddered into the little station at Marsh Gibbon and Poundon, on the slow and pottering line between Cambridge and Oxford. Usually it was dusk by the time we got there, and I can remember seeing the gas lamps lit and flaring, a pleasing moment for anyone who likes a little melancholy. But equally remarkable was the lowness of the platform. Had it actually sunk into the marsh after which the desolate little halt was named? I recall a withered, gloomy porter in a peaked cap carefully setting steps by the

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 23 November 2017

Windsor Castle on Monday night sounds like a children’s party magnified. The rooms were filled with golden-leaved trees. A giant block of ice carved with the initials of the Queen on one side and the Duke of Edinburgh on the other dominated the reception room. Her sons wore their Windsor coats. A magician made a table levitate and move unsupported round the room. As with a children’s party, there were no speeches, and everyone was pleased and excited. After 70 years married, the two nonagenarians involved presumably felt, among family and friends, that they had earned the right to be unserious. The occasion must have been sweet for Prince Philip.

Friday

Toby Young

It is unfair to blame Oxford for the low number of black undergraduates

David Lammy has been making headlines today, accusing Oxford of ‘social apartheid’ because it offers so few places to black British students. This claim is based on an FOI request Lammy submitted to the university asking how many black British A-level students each college has offered places to in the last six years. The most eye-catching statistic is that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not offer a place to a single black British pupil with A-levels in 2015 and Oriel College has only offered one place to a black British A-level student since 2010. There is no doubt that Oxford does admit too few black British students, but

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Salon Strauss

An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the Oxford Lieder Festival, where familiar repertoire is getting a reboot this year thanks to some brilliantly ambitious programming. When it comes to classical music, we’re used to living in a bifurcated world. On the one hand, you have the contemporary ensembles: the orchestras, choirs and quartets performing pretty much everything from Mozart onwards. And on the other the early music groups, whose territory is everything that’s left — Bach, Byrd, Hildegard of Bingen. It’s only fairly recently, and thanks to groups such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment,

Thursday

James Walton

Gleaming pictures of the past

If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt Affair, you’ll almost certainly be right. Once again, Hollinghurst explores British gay history by plunging us into haute bohemia over several decades of the 20th century. (A few years ago he told an interviewer that the main characters in his next book ‘will all be more or less heterosexual’: a plan that sounded pretty unlikely at the time and, seeing as this is his next book, was evidently abandoned.) Once again, he combines his broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis — and all in prose that manages

Thursday

Peter Stanford

A poet in prose

Literary reputation can be a fickle old business. Those garlanded during their lifetimes are often quickly forgotten once dead. Yet there is a daily procession of visitors to Keats’s grave in the English cemetery in Rome, where the headstone reads, ‘Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water’, so sure was the poet that the neglect he had suffered up to his death would continue ever after. By any standards, C. Day-Lewis — he disliked Cecil, the name given to him by his Church of Ireland vicar father — was among the most glittering figures on the 20th-century British literary scene, celebrated, well-connected, a bestseller and Poet Laureate for