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(Image: The Leisure Society playing in London) Ahead of their gig at The Bullingdon on 20th September, I caught up with The Leisure Society’s frontman Nick Hemming to discuss their latest album, Arrivals and Departures, his biggest influences, and the creative process that shapes his songwriting. Currently on the second leg of their biggest tour, […]
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Image Description: “The Boulevard Montmartre at Night’ by Camille Pissarro This little novel by Zola (published in 1878) begins in the cloistered luxury of a bourgeois bedroom, bathed in blue light. It is here we encounter Hélène, the hero of the story, who is deep in a heavy, drowsy sleep. Hélène is suddenly woken by […]
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It feels like only yesterday when my eleven-year-old-self was given an old copy of Empire magazine by my father. It listed the greatest science fiction films of all time, and the dystopian section of the publication immediately caught my eye. Or perhaps it was the glaring, stylised eye of the figure in the image that […]
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When we think of famous artists, from El Greco to Van Gogh, it seems astonishing that so many only found fame after death. As a result of this phenomenon, there has arisen a well-known myth we like to call ‘the death effect’: the idea that an artist’s work will increase significantly in value once they […]
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Image description: Plath’s gravestone, vandalised in 2012 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are undoubtedly two of the 20th-century’s most celebrated poets. However, in the decades following their death, it seems that the public increasingly disregard their verse in favour of a deep fascination with their married life. Decades after Hughes’ death – and almost 60 […]
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Image description: bronze reclining satyr figure The art and artefacts of Pompeii radiate life and death in this Ashmolean exhibition. AD79: the eruption of Vesuvius marked the end of the lives of the Pompeiians. The rediscovery of the city in the 18th century marked the beginning of what could be argued to be a new […]
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Image description: The cast of the Cats musical on Broadway Hollywood’s recent obsession with CGI felines has me concerned. What with Disney’s entirely CGI realised remake of The Lion King, and Universal‘s first look at the rather disturbingly rendered humanoid cats of Cats (2019), they’re everywhere and they’re causing consternation amongst film fans, especially myself. […]
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Image description: 15th century engraving of men in battle. Kanye West and Taylor Swift, the sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus: these are just a few names of today’s well-known artists who feuded over artistic differences, vied for being recognised as the better artist or had bitter disagreements due […]
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I’m sure we all remember the pithy response that Georgia, in Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, is given as a reason for why she shouldn’t have dressed up as an olive to a fancy-dress party. “Boys don’t like girls for funniness”. Although a throwaway line in an admittedly sub-par noughties romcom, this nonetheless taps into […]
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Ahhh, the long vacation. At last, examinations and coursework assessments are behind us and we are finally permitted to relax. Well, with the slight aside of vacation reading that is. In order to fully escape from the clutches of such texts and memories of those ever more muggy libraries, many of us may be tempted […]
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Image description: Agatha Christie’s desk at Greenways Almost anybody would be able to call to mind a number of famous titles from the canon: Jane Eyre, War and Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc., etc. … Because of our acquaintance with these famous works, most people are desensitised to the titles themselves. When one actually considers […]
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Throughout history, it seems that certain human behaviours remain steadfast, regardless of the extraordinary societal developments which have occurred over the past centuries; practices which we might view as a modern revelation are often far from it, as humans are, despite our sophistication, often driven by fundamental desires and behaviours (some of the most basic […]
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Warning: Spoilers ahead. Big budgets aren’t unusual with Netflix; millions of dollars can be invested in a single episode. Reports from Variety suggested that each episode in Star Trek Discovery’s first season cost over $8 million. If the visual spectacle of the show’s sophomore season is anything to go by, the budget will have received […]
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Image description: Monument at Chernobyl I am afraid- desperately afraid- of global warming. For a period in February, after those few days when it was hot, so hot you could walk home from the club in a t-shirt because the air was climate-change balmy, and after reading David Wallace Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, I became […]
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Gatsby at Trinity follows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mystery man Jay Gatsby before he was a mystery. We watch as he enrols as a student at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1919, after serving in the Great War. The play is adapted by the book of the same name by Ian Flintoff, who studied Modern Languages himself […]
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Image description: Rembrandt van Rijn – Homer On 25 January this year, the journal Chemical Communications published a major breakthrough on a mystery that had hitherto perplexed the art world: why the Old Master Rembrandt van Rijn’s celebrated painting ‘Homer’ (1663) was coated in a thin white crust. The unknown composition and origin of the […]
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I can proudly say that out of all the recipes I’ve cooked up, from ketchup and mustard tomato pasta to popcorn and prosciutto, this is my prized achievement. Having been inspired by Chang’s ‘Fritos Fritters’ from Orange is the New Black, I felt that pasta and junk food is the combination that no one asked […]
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Warning: Major spoilers ahead. The online petition to remake the final season of the most expensive, illegally downloaded television series of all time has currently received over 1.5 million signatures. Its creator, Dylan D, implores viewers to remedy the ‘woefully incompetent’ writing of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. But is all of this backlash deserved? […]
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The dishevelled set promises exactly what the voyeur is here to see: drugs; sex; cigarettes; fishnets and feistiness. There will be no taboo left unshaken here. The steady rhythm seeps onto the stage and the hustlers are infected, masterfully delivering their dance of life in the 1980s streets of LA. A captivating introduction into the […]
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