The life and soul of the party
There is no sweeter joy than partying at someone else's expense, especially if you've no idea whose party it is anyway. The total lack of responsibility, the endless nights and the wandering across Oxford in yesterday's clothes having woken up under a cold kebab epitomise to some the decadence of student life at its best....
Features: Weighing up the pros and cons
First off, I must admit that I am not the most physically imposing of young gentlemen. However, as anyone who has seen Fight Club would surely surmise, matching definition with the most revealing of underwear ads is not the be all and end all of masculinity.
Features: A spin on the information revolution
Last Friday Jeremy Paxman spoke at the Exam Schools on the efficiency of the Millbank spin machine. He told of a reporter being telephoned at an indecently early hour on a Sunday morning to be told what the Prime minister was "expected to say" on Breakfast with Frost. "Call me old-fashioned", Paxman said, "but I always rather thought that what someone said in an interview rather depended on what they were asked." A fair point by the master of the tough interview, but of course this is an extremely old-fashioned view. It is also old-fashioned for Paxman to be so offended when he heard of the reporters who, when confronted with a Downing Street press release, asked "What shall we say about it?"...
Features: Getting behind famous Seamus
The facts about Seamus Heaney are well known. Described by Robert Lowell as "the greatest Irish poet since Yeats," he is three times a Whitbread prize-winner, a Nobel winner, and has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Harvard.
Features: Marks of a good education
Talking to Howard Marks was remarkably similar to talking to a fellow student who you spoke to in Fresher's week but who, somewhere in the middle of their first term, became absorbed into a nocturnal world that takes place somewhere up the Cowley road and smells very much of pot. The eternal undergraduate is easy to talk to, but constantly gives the impression that between you and him there exists, in quite a literal sense, a pungent smokescreen. Through the fumes you can detect a mild air of cynicism and discontent, and as the air clears you can even tell that there are reasoned, if controversial, views which would develop into something striking if the holder could ever be arsed....