Oxford

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

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

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and James Delingpole debate if all right wing people have bad music tastes” startat=700] Listen [/audioplayer]A friend of mine once watched Jeremy Corbyn try to rape an owl. This was the early to mid-1980s. The Labour leader used to come round to my squat in Leytonstone and we’d sit cross–legged on the floor, sniffing glue from a large plastic bag, and listen to Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’. Jeremy was on the periphery of our little clique and we were suspicious of him because he was posh. Sometimes, when we were passing the glue bag around, we’d miss him out from sheer spite. Eventually

University towns are already awash with fur-trimmed gowns and proud parents, but behind the smiles there’s a glimmer of resentment: four in 10 of those graduating this year think they’ve been ripped-off. According to a survey of 1000 final-year students by ComRes, students are split over whether they think their degree was good value for money. One factor determining their verdict was their subject, with two-thirds of those studying science, technology, engineering and maths saying their course was worth the fees. Just 44 per cent of humanities and social science students agreed. An obvious reason for this discrepancy is contact time: medics get at least 20 contact hours a week

This week, the Guardian published its annual university league table. The rankings are as bewildering to anyone acquainted with the reality of university reputations as they are misleading to anyone who is not. Should you wish to study Economics, for instance, you are told that you would do better taking an offer from Surrey (4) than LSE (13). If you’re really short of options, then you could settle for a place at Manchester (54) or Newcastle (60). Equally, for an aspiring physicist Leicester (5) or Hertfordshire (6) are deemed superior to Imperial (8) or indeed UCL (12). This list does not reflect what graduate employers actually think. From an employer’s perspective,