Author: Scott Harker and Sam Sykes

Towards the end of Trinity term 2016, the two of us received a slightly strange email to the OxStu Editor gmail account, from a man who introduced himself as follows – ‘My name is Keisuke Saito, from the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan.’ Spam alert – so we thought. But as we read on, we […]

  On the 11th March 2011 at 14:46 JST, an earthquake struck Japan off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, in Northern Honshu, triggering a massive tsunami and the now-famous meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The earthquake, known as Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (the Great East Japan Earthquake) was the most powerful to hit Japan […]

The English National Opera, London’s second opera company, is in crisis. Earlier this year, its Music Director, Mark Wigglesworth, quit his post after a tenure that lasted barely six months. This follows the 2015 resignation of the company’s Artistic Director in the wake of Arts Council demands for a 25% budget cut, the implementation of […]

Splendour is a play which delights in being enigmatic. Written by Abi Morgan, screenwriter of Suffragette and The Iron Lady, this claustrophobic character study manages to be disorientating, roundabout, and yet urgently compelling. Kathryn (Natalie Woodward), a photojournalist, is sent to the lavish house of a dictator and his wife, Micheline (Rosie Richards), in “a […]

There’s a party in my mouth and only one genre of music is playing. Also no-one else is invited, that would be disgusting. Jamie Oliver’s would be the 1905 Revolution in comparison with this bona fide Bolshevik Uprising in the fruit bowl. When the Frankensteinian fruit scientists of New Zealand put a Braeburn to stud […]

So I’m a vegetarian. Great! But that’s about it really: I don’t eat meat. I’m not particularly excited by the many opportunities cutting meat of all forms, out of my life possesses. I could revolutionise the way I eat. Venture into new and exciting dishes, with foods I’ve never tried before as compensation for the […]

When I look back at my Hilary term last year, it was nothing short of dull. The excitement of freshers’ week had long since dissipated, aside from one glorious bout of snowfall in February, the weather remained damp at best and Arctic at worst, whilst my idealistic Michaelmas expectations of being enlightened by the written […]

My kitchen in college measures two metres by one metre, barely enough room to swing a decent sized rodent, let alone a cat. With ten undergraduates desperate to make toast and swing cats, the situation is somewhat problematic. I, for one, can’t stand feeling chivvied when I’m chopping chives, or being kettled when I’m just […]

Jayne Wilton has spent the last decade exploring the act of breathing, collaborating variously with particle physicists to capture the ephemeral phenomenon which we take, so often, for granted. ‘And Breathe…’ combines selections from ‘Drawing Breath’, ‘Expire’ and ‘Breathe’ – studies on “evocative records of moments in time” made tangible through novel methods of capture, […]

As I stand in the queue for the Tate’s multisensory experiment, I feel a mixture of exhilaration and apprehension. I am all awash with the thrill of its novelty, but at the same time I vaguely imagine my faculties being deadened by the sensory overload, like the soma-addled wraiths of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, […]

Although I was asked to write on a fictional character I secretly wish was real, I unashamedly confess that not only do I publicly hope Sherlock Holmes existed, but I often convince myself that he did in fact walk the streets of Victorian London. No other character exhibits such charisma, presence of mind and incredible […]

A few months ago I was browsing the Sunday Times bestseller lists, and was shocked to discover that The Communist Manifesto was at number seven in the non-fiction chart. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, but there was no mistake; in 2015 The Communist Manifesto was still a hot enough property to trouble the Sunday […]

Even with his last book now six years in the past, David Nicholls has been keeping busy. Since the publication of the hugely popular bittersweet love story One Day (and the slightly less hugely popular film), Nicholls has written the wonderful two-part TV drama The 7:39 (starring David Morrissey and Sheridan Smith), as well as […]

A funny German writer? What on earth do you mean? Yes, but that is why I fell in love with Heinrich Heine; for me, he was one of the major reasons for wanting to study German literature at degree level. This is also one of the few texts that, despite having spurted out an essay […]

Sonia Delaunay’s work crackles with the electric charge of modernity. Hers is a world of garish streetlights, Paris ballrooms, high-speed trains, the frenetic crash of a new urban life. Born in Russia in 1885, Delaunay spent most of her working life in Paris before her death in 1979; in what seems a strange oversight, she […]

Tracey Emin’s art has brought her notoriety in the form of violently divided opinion: she is regarded as provocative, attention-seeking, and unartistic, as well as powerful, visionary, and of great cultural and artistic significance. I would argue that she is all of the above, and these descriptors are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Her rise to […]

Kitchen, the English-language debut of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto, like the most of the books I buy these days (perpetually skint student that I am) was discovered in a charity shop. I picked it up because it looked to be a very interesting character study by a writer from a culture I was very interested […]

Linda Nochlin, in her 1988 book Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, asks, “Why are there no great female artists?” The answer is that we are looking in the wrong places. Rather than unearthing unappreciated women artists from history, or rediscovering forgotten female painters, “ the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary […]

A cappella is a genre that has been much in vogue recently, most notably with the success of the American musical comedy film Pitch Perfect in 2012. I have often unconsciously pigeonholed the genre as ‘light’ music, associating it with doo-wop bands, cheesy barbershop quartets, and groups like Fascinating Aida, who have used a cappella for vicious […]