Author: Henner Petin

One may well have certain expectations when going to see a garden play at the University Church on the life of Mary Magdalen. Whatever they may be, this late afternoon of theatre would not meet them. And that is precisely the merit of this production. It was a truly refreshing way of handling a difficult […]

They say Oxford is another world, but for many students that simply isn’t enough. Some want to seek out new friends, new experiences, to boldly split infinitives that no man (or indeed woman) has ever split before. Hence the existence of the Oxford Star Trek Society, a group of Trekkies who meet every Monday to […]

“Gotta catch ‘em all!” The rallying cry of a generation of schoolchildren, a generation currently in the process of growing up, getting jobs, and (in some unfortunate cases) studying at Oxford. Hence the Oxford Pokémon Society, a group of young aficionados who meet regularly to play, discuss, and generally enjoy everyone’s favourite child-friendly blood sport. […]

Picture it. It’s the summer of 2015, you are a young, handsome, carefree undergraduate, looking to earn some money while trying desperately to cling on to Oxford life in the face of the idle and pensive mass of the summer vacation. This was precisely my situation (okay, minus the handsome, and the carefree too for […]

So, there’s this show called Doctor Who. You might have heard of it. It’s good fun. Similarly fun are show’s fans, a number of whom attend Oxford University. The Doctor Who Society (WhoSoc for short) organise weekly meetings involving TV-watching, geek quizzes, and speaker events. Taking over the club this term are Corpuscles Hannah Taylor […]

Imagine Black Mirror as written by Samuel Beckett. Dark, clever and deeply emotional, ONLIFE tells the story of one man struggling to deal with modern technology. But while it displays a lot more tech savviness and emotional depth than the average screed about those damn kids and their smartphones, ONLIFE is unfortunately marred by some […]

I never thought of gargoyles as particularly musical creatures. Fortunately, Oxford University’s own acappella group is out to disprove prejudice against mythical creatures with their most recent showing at The Mad Hatter pub, Lashing Through The Snow. A lively assembly of Christmas carols and acappella standards, ‘Lashing’ made for an extremely pleasant evening. While the […]

Whenever I go to a new barber’s and ask for my head shaved, I always get some variation on ‘Are you sure? That will leave your hair very short’. Aside from the fact that making my hair shorter is rather the point of a haircut, there’s often a slightly uneasy edge to these moments, polite […]

Oscar Wilde famously said that fashion was “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” The same could very easily be said about the bestseller charts. Literature goes in and out of style like everything else, along with the writers behind that literature, and there is a sense […]

Kate Brown has had an eclectic career, working on projects as wildly various as children’s adventure stories, Marvel’s Young Avengers and even a comic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Brown has earned a reputation for colourful, imaginative artwork and writing which skirts the line between the fantastical and the disturbing. She was recently hired […]

Third week has been insanely good for student drama, and The Prophetess feels like a combination of the week’s biggest barnstormers. Between the heightened emotion and fearful history of Titus Andronicus and the iconic music and bravura style of Singin’ in the Rain lies this production, a classy little number for the Keble O’Reilly, from […]

It’s a big ask to pull off a play like Hamlet, which is so unavoidably iconic. In director James Watt’s capable hands, however, and thanks to an electric cast, Poor Player Productions’s take on Shakespeare’s classic promises to be one of the most exciting productions of the term. There is no room for slack in […]

There are two things that any British production of Singin’ in the Rain needs to do in order to succeed. The first is, like any production, to nail the song from which the film takes its name. The other is to not have the American accents sound completely awful. Judging by the preview, this production […]

And they’re off! Cue years of leaflets in the letterbox, knocks on the door, and people approaching you on the streets. What do they want to talk about? They’ll be asking you how you’ll be voting in the upcoming referendum on the EU. After you give them the wrong answer, you’ll have to stand there […]

The Syrian conflict has quickly jumped back into the Western geopolitical conversation. ISIS, though failing to grab as many headlines as before, remains a focus of Western military intelligence. As civil war continues to destroy the country, millions of Syrians have fled, with hundreds of thousands of refugees making their way to Europe this year. […]

Photo: dennis crowley If you google Liu Bolin, the results will largely celebrate the playful colour and amusement of his work. Bolin’s recent international success has centred explicitly on just that, ignoring or failing to realise the darker socio-political implications of his creative assertion of erased identity. In fact, Bolin’s first use of the ‘invisible […]

Photo: Penguin Books César Hidalgo is a physicist by training, and currently runs the Macro Connections group at MIT’s media lab. His book is (amongst other things) about theories of economic growth. It is not immediately apparent how these are connected. And that’s what makes it such an interesting read. Why Information Grows begins by […]

Photo: Mario Nunes Vais Una donna. A woman. And yet, the seemingly unspecific choice of title is rather misleading. For the almost exclusively autobiographical story of Rina Faccio (The pseudonym Sibllia was adopted from a name given to her by a lover) is anything but vague. We find ourselves in Italy, at the turn of […]

Photo: Anubis3 Jean Paul Sartre was offered the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. Famously, he declined, as he declined all official literary honours, stating that writers should not allow themselves to be turned into an institution. Looking at the history of Nobel Prizes, however, one may wonder if the conferment of a Nobel Prize […]