Oxford

Last month Ntokozo Qwabe made the news after he wrote of his happiness at making a waitress shed ‘white tears’ when his friend refused to tip until she ‘returned the land’. Since then, a crowdfunder was set up to raise money to compensate the waitress for the incident, while Qwabe — who is a key figure in Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall movement — has made several comments that suggest he feels little remorse over the debacle. Now back in Oxford, the postgraduate student has offered his ‘final say’ on the incident after being greeted with a host of death threats on return. Qwabe says the Senior Dean of his college has had to meet with

I had the rather subversive idea of offering a six-figure sum to Oriel College, Oxford. On one condition: that the college immediately withdraw the Rhodes scholarship from the South African Ntokozo Qwabe, the hypocrite who led the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, as well as any other recipients of Cecil’s munificence who are blackening his name a century later. It is the least these hypocrites deserve. Oxbridge has become a joke in the way it tries to emulate the LSE in radicalism and other such ludicrous poses. The group that called Jihadi John ‘a beautiful young man’ should be allowed to speak at Oxford, according to the

The Spectator’s fifth most-read article of the week was Nigel Farndale on what life was like on board a warship in our ‘much reduced’ Royal Navy. Nigel joined the crew of HMS Bulwark in the Mediterranean where he found a Royal Navy undergoing an identity crisis amidst swingeing cuts. Our fourth most-read piece was Damian Thompson on the furore surrounding the last-minute decision to pull an incendiary book about the Church of England. Publisher Bloomsbury sent a panicky message to reviewers asking them to return their copies of ‘That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People’. You can read Damian’s article about why

In 1962 I made the leap of a lifetime – from a severely cash-limited working-class household in Hackney (my father had been a packer in a Whitechapel warehouse) to Oxford University. No obstacles were put in my way. Educated at an LCC secondary school, I spent a week at Lincoln College, taking exams for admission to the BA (Hons) in Modern History, and answering questions at a series of intellectually punishing academic interviews. No concessions were made to my socio-economic background. Nor, incidentally, did I benefit from any private tuition, which my parents could never have afforded. I was awarded an Exhibition (a form of scholarship) on merit. Had the college

In the middle of Oxford is a socking great cinema: once the Ritz, it’s now an Odeon multiplex. Back in 1962, in the intermission of, I think, The Longest Day, the curtain moved and on walked a group of men, young I suppose, though to my 15-year-old eyes they seemed impossibly grown-up. It was the Oxford United team, led by their manager Arthur Turner, and including such titans as Ron ‘The Tank’ Atkinson, his brother Graham, John Shuker and Maurice Kyle. They had just won promotion from the Southern League to the Fourth Division (today’s League Two). They were introduced to the audience, and I have been a fan ever

Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil John Rhodes smashed his authority, and broke his tribe. The Matabele (a breakaway people from the Zulu kingdom to the south) had been making their way north, and by the time Rhodes arrived on the scene were in effective control of a vast area of southern Africa, stretching from the Limpopo river to the Zambezi. Matabeleland was rich in minerals and the tribe were being pestered by white prospectors. Rhodes saw his opportunity. He made an ally of Lobengula, who had been king since 1869, and in 1888 persuaded him

I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the personal data of four million users. But I feel I’m on the front line of the cyberwar nevertheless. In August, someone unknown to me tried to spend £1,200 at House of Fraser on my credit card account. The bank, to its credit, sniffed a fraud, rejected the transaction, cancelled the card and invited me to speak to a nice young man in India who talked me through the corrective procedure, including deleting a false email address inserted by the fraudster and setting up a new password to add extra security