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Trinity Term 2016 ~ Volume 28 No 2 ~ www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
THE INSIDE
STORY OF CECIL
How some good might still
come from the illegal
shooting of Cecil the lion
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Welcome
Oxford Today Welcome
2016
TRINIT Y TERM
Anne Brunner-Ellis, Head of Design and
Publications Office, University of Oxford
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University of Oxford
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Tom Hockaday, technology transfer consultant
Nicolette Jones, author and journalist
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Seamus Perry, Professor of English Literature,
Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford
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Oxford University Alumni Board
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OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/PHOTOVIBE
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD:
Radcliffe Square part-bathed in warm afternoon sunshine
Magdalen tutor Professor Laurence Brockliss has just published an
800-page, single-volume history of the University aimed at the
general reader (see p51). This is an extraordinary achievement
and makes for partly discomforting reading. The Catholic, then
Anglican, then imperial and finally global university that we
recognise today has beaten all the odds to remain in the global
Top Ten. The author frets that it faces unprecedented changes,
yet lacks the ability to reform itself comprehensively or say ‘no’
to government interference. He dangles £8 billion as the price tag
for independence, adding that having raised well over £2 billion
already, as a result of magnificent alumni and donor support,
the objective is not impossible. He adds that a state school like the
University of Wisconsin draws only 18.6% of its income from the
public purse, compared to 50% for Oxford. The book deserves
to be widely read and will create generous levels of debate within
the University and at the moment when recently welcomed
Vice-Chancellor Professor Louise Richardson is just beginning her
office. For her view of where things lie, see our interview online at
bit.do/vicechancellor (see also p9, for an excerpt).
Elsewhere in this issue, consider the state of French
intellectualism (dismal – but why? asks an Oxford don); how the
University is helping displaced scholars from places such as Syria;
how close we are to achieving the holy grail of commercially
viable nuclear fusion, and the full account of Cecil the lion by
the director of the Oxford conservation unit that had radio-tagged
him, Professor David Macdonald of WildCRU.
The text paper in this magazine is chlorine free. The paper manufacturer
has been independently certified in accordance with the rules of the
Forest Stewardship Council.
EDITOR: Richard Lofthouse
Email: oxford.today
@admin.ox.ac.uk
@oxtoday
/oxfordtoday
Front cover: A portrait of the ill-fated Cecil by Andy Loveridge
from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU)
www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |
@oxtoday
3
AL SPE
UM CI
NI AL
OF
FE
R
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Artist Ian Davis on
Oxford’s sensory
delights, p52
In this issue…
CECIL THE LION
Your voice
6 Letters
Oxford Today online
8 Most-read and upcoming
9 V-C interview
Inside Oxford
10News
Shaping the world
38
14 The big picture
17Research
20Oxonians
23 Alumni voices
Features
26Bottling the sun
How the quest for commercially viable
nuclear fusion stands: an update
32Tossed not sunk
Pondering the parlous state of
modern French intellectualism
38The lion, the web
and the WildCRU
26
42
How the illegal death of Cecil the lion
changed conservation - an insider’s tale
42Doing our bit?
How Oxford is helping academics
fleeing persecution around the world
TRINIT Y HIGHLIGHTS
Common room
Internships
60
63
Barrie Juniper Lord Moser
How short, compressed
micro-internships are the
way forward for students
Meeting a man who really
knows his apples – and
everybody else’s
Looking back on the life of
the former Warden of
Wadham College
24
@oxtoday
49 Book reviews
52 Sensory Oxford
55Art
57 Good sport
59 Food and drink
Oxonian lives
60Portrait
63Obituary
66 My Oxford
5
Your voice Letters
Your voice
Letters
We welcome letters for publication, but may edit
them to fit. Unless you request otherwise, letters
may also appear on our website. Write to us at:
Oxford Today, University Offices,
Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JD
College Coats of Arms
In response to...
So striving to improve the lot
of man is futile, we are but
base beasts, and dreams of
an improved future are just
that and waking from them
would make us happier?
Odd. I sit reading this over my
breakfast (generous, hot, with
nice coffee) in a warm house,
before I drive to London some
60 miles away to see my
father who has lived to the
positively patriarchal age of
95 thanks to angioplasty and
pills. It is raining outside, yet
I will stay dry.
The chances that I am
burgled, attacked, shot,
enslaved, that my wife or
daughters are raped or my
house is casually burned to
the ground are minimal. The
number of highwaymen on
the M11 is small. I have time,
and education, to be irritated
by Gray’s pronouncements,
and a postal service and
internet to deliver them to me.
None of these things would
have been true 1,000 years
ago. Of course removing
Saddam Hussein did not
turn Iraq into middle-class
England. Of course societies
can go backwards as well as
forwards by the measures of
progress that other societies
deem just.
But the grinding pessimism
that implies that all you can do
is live moment-to-moment is
as unjustified as the idea that
toppling Hussein would turn
Baghdad into Bermondsey
overnight. If, as per Gray via
Berlin from Herzen, ‘The
purpose of life is to live it’,
then we have made progress.
Perhaps what would make us
happier is forgetting the
grandiose pontification of
politicians and philosophers,
6
and remembering that if
I have made my life better
without making yours worse,
then I have done OK, and if
I can make both our lives
better then we, members of
the base human race, have
made progress indeed.
William Bains
Corpus Christi, 1975
(A drab, materialistic
biochemist)
In searching for the
undergraduate rooms of
Isaiah Berlin, John Gray
reminds us of how far he has
wandered from the ideas of
his mentor, not least in his
recent works, which reveal
what can happen when an
intellectual loses his ideals.
Professor Gray has in his
career been a constant critic
of positivist, determinist and
materialist theories, but in
their place he has now
erected a bleak, antihumanism that in its nihilistic
outlook projects a vision of
a dystopian future Berlin
would have rejected as
unreflective of humankind’s
innate cognitive capacity.
[Gray] has at least provided
an answer to the question of
how an intellectual lives after
ideals. He moves to Bath.
David K Warner
Harris-Manchester,
1996
Despite his many admirable
qualities, and speaking as one
who also grew up in South
Shields, I have long found
John Gray to be highly
dispiriting. While Keynes
famously asserted that in the
long run we are all dead, Gray
basically thinks that a good
many of us may as well be
dead in the short run.
Accordingly, I have come to
OUI/JOBY SESSIONS
OT 28.1
John Gray
Arising from the excellent
article ‘What’s your blazon?’
it might be worthwhile
comparing the coats of arms
of the University of Oxford
with those of Cambridge.
Our arms have an open book
of knowledge crowned in
glory whereas Cambridge has
a locked book and four fierce
lions preventing anyone from
opening it.
Incidentally, St Anne’s
College was known as
St Anne’s Society before it
became a college, not the
Society for St Anne.
Ann Spokes Symonds
St Anne’s Society, 1947
the conclusion that he is,
in fact, a cheerleader for
the modern counterEnlightenment; which
matters deeply at the
present juncture.
As someone from an
Islamic background, I have
long argued that Islam is in
urgent need of not just a
reformation, but a fully blown
Enlightenment; the benefits
of which will accrue not only
to the 1.6 billion Muslims but
to the world at large. Those
arguing the same in the
Islamic world are like gold
dust but if they stick their
necks out they might have
them literally chopped off. Yet
even in the relative serenity of
the ivory towers in this
country, I have been
threatened for challenging
Islamic doctrines.
Rumy Hasan
Green, 1994
I know many will join me in
declaring that John Gray’s
tutorials in Classical Political
Thought were the highlight of
their Oxford careers. To
paraphrase Waugh, the lore
which I acquired that term will
be with me in one shape or
another to my last hour.
Charles Ewald
Christ Church, 1979
With great interest I read
John Tepper Marlin’s article
‘What’s your blazon?’ in the
current edition of Oxford Today.
As an old member of Linacre
College, I was particularly
intrigued by the description of
the College’s coat of arms with
reference to Thomas Linacre,
the founder of the College.
Marlin rightly mentions
Linacre’s service as physician
to the King and founder
of the Royal College of
Physicians. Given the blazon
with the alpha and the omega
symbolising Christ in the
Book of Revelation, I was
surprised Linacre’s Catholic
faith was omitted. In fact, he
resigned his position as King’s
physician in 1520 to become
a priest. Then he used his
fortune to found the Royal
College of Physicians.
Pia Jolliffe
Linacre, 2011
Rhodes
Cecil Rhodes will be a hero
to few of the citizens of this
country. Nevertheless, he is
a key figure in our imperial
history and a major benefactor
of Oriel College; similar figures
@oxtoday
Letters Your voice
Email your letter to:
of historical significance are
acknowledged, though not
necessarily reverenced, by
plaques and statues in towns
and cities all over Britain. It is
right and proper that we have
visible reminders of our history.
When such as the Nazis in
Germany burn books, and such
as the Taliban in Afghanistan
and so-called Islamic State in
Syria pulverise ancient
monuments and artefacts that
remind them of a history, a
cultural diversity, a freedom of
thought to which they object,
civilisation is threatened and
must be defended, not bartered
away in the manner Churchill
characterised as offering up
hapless victims to a crocodile
in the wretched hope that the
beast will not eventually devour
all in its way.
In Lincoln, where I live, there
are many Roman remains, and
a post-Norman-invasion
cathedral and castle. The idea
that an unrepresentative group
should come along and
campaign fanatically for the
removal of these as violent
reminders of the colonial
enslavement of ancient Britons
and Anglo-Saxon English is no
more absurd and offensive
that what is happening now
at Oriel College.
No more absurd and
offensive, indeed, than would
be a proposal that Ms Moira
Wallace OBE, Provost of Oriel
College, should be dismissed
for having accepted the royal
honour of the Order of the
British Empire.
[Ed: see News]
Wilfred Attenborough
Independent scholar
Vipers
Dan Eatherley is to be
congratulated on his new
book about the dreaded
@oxtoday
bushmaster. It really is
territorial and bad-tempered,
plus its bite is lethal.
During my time in the
jungles of Central America
(visiting archaeological sites)
it was the only snake we were
warned about, and indeed the
only one that the explorer
Colonel Fawcett mentions
during his account of his
travels in the Amazon and
Mato Grosso in the 1920s,
when they were apparently
much in evidence.
There is also reputedly
a false bushmaster which is
non-venomous but which
has the same patterning
as the real one. I must say
I never stopped to ask
which was which!
Tim Connell
Queen’s, 1968
Sir David Butler
I have been asked by Nuffield
College to write a biography of
Sir David Butler, the eminent
psephologist and historian,
who many of you will have
seen on television, especially
on the late-night general
election results programmes
between 1950 and 1979. I am
having a fascinating time
interviewing David, who is
now 90 and still lives in
Oxford. I would like to speak to
anybody who has interesting
recollections of David.
CrickML@aol.com or
phone 07762 601173.
Michael Crick
New College, 1976
College wine cellars
Dr Hanneke Wilson’s piece
‘in the doldrums’, about
the decline of Bordeaux
en primeur concludes:
‘For now, Oxford’s wine
stewards are looking
elsewhere and claret is
/oxfordtoday
no longer the mainstay
of our cellars.’
‘Elsewhere’? Outside France
perhaps? Italy or Spain?
Or mirabile dictu, the
New World? – the USA,
Chile, Australia, New Zealand
or South Africa… etc.
It’s time to throw open your
windows and let in fresh air
and sunshine to revitalise
your palates and your cellars.
I exhort you to embrace and
to implement change; it’s long
overdue – you’re missing out
big time!
Christopher Smyth
Trinity, 1960
Evolution
I am surprised that Georgina
Ferry should be shocked that
the protein-making ‘words’ in
our genome only comprise
about 1.5% of it, albeit there
are 100,000 human proteins
for them to encode. To call
the other 98.5% ‘junk DNA’
seems to ignore the fact that
I am not (nor is anyone else)
just an amorphous blob of
protein. We have hair at one
end and toenails at the other,
and an unimaginably complex
array of tissues and organs in
between, all arranged in their
proper places so as to function
as a whole.
So, somewhere in that
98.5% there must be genes
for hair and toenails, arms
and legs, brain (with its 80
billion or so cells), spleen,
heart and everything else.
That is, the proteins have to be
given a very precise threedimensional order, not just an
existence. The shocking thing
is that that can be done with
so few genes, and that the
forming body usually comes
@oxtoday
For full
versions of these
letters and to read
further alumni
correspondence, visit
www.oxfordtoday.
ox.ac.uk
out in full working order, in
spite of the myriad ways it
could go wrong. Ferry’s article
is full of interest, and is not
the only one in which
structure is ignored while
composition is accounted for.
I have read many others with
the same apparent blind spot.
The specification of bricks
and pipes is a small part of
an architect’s job: the main
part is indicating how they
are to be put together to
make a building.
Alasdair Livingston
Merton, 1947
Oxbridge Transport
Could Oxford and Cambridge
be persuaded to set up travel
arrangements between them?
The public bus takes 3 hrs 20
mins. A university mini-bus
that went, directly, two,
possibly three, times a day in
each direction would
revolutionise the situation.
Alternatively some
departments have mini-buses
that regularly make the
journey; they may have spaces.
Or private cars.
We should be ecological,
save much time and effort,
and the ride would doubtless
foster many a congenial
conversation. It would require
an online booking system with
reasonable payment covering
costs, available to those
holding a university card.
A mini-bus that took bikes
(on the roof?), as indeed the
public bus takes bikes, would
be an added boon.
Daphne Hampson
Associate, Faculty of
Theology and Religion
(Oxford) and Life Member,
Clare Hall, Cambridge
ONLINE
New letters are regularly uploaded to the OT website
oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/letters
7
OT Digital content
Oxford Today online
Video highlights
ANGEL SHARP MEDIA
Among many other videos shown in the past few months,
we highlight here a new series on Wytham Woods:
see bit.do/wythamwoods
THE TOP
5
MOST
POPULAR
OT WEB
FEATURES
1. Philosopher John Gray
Our in-depth interview with
the renowned former Oxford
philosopher was a major hit
online. So yes, forget your
delusions and be happy…
bit.do/johngray
2. Poet Simon Armitage
Olivia Gordon’s report from
the inaugural lecture of
Oxford’s newly appointed
Professor of Poetry pulled in
a great number of readers.
bit.do/simonarmitage
3. A new railway to Oxford
Our ride on the first train from
London’s Marylebone to
Oxford Parkway, a new
station, captured the anorak
in Oxonians everywhere.
bit.do/oxfordrailway
4. Upending history
Dr Peter Frankopan explains
how his new blockbuster, The
Silk Roads, adopts an eastern
perspective on world history
bit.do/frankopan
Click
here to
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8
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5. The re-wilding don
Charles Foster, a medical
ethics fellow, has tried to live
as a badger, an otter, an urban
fox, a red deer and a swift.
This has been the source of
much interest among readers
and their children!
bit.do/wilddon
Send an email to
@oxtoday
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES
OT Digital content
Meet the new Vice-Chancellor
Oxford Today editor Richard Lofthouse talks to Louise Richardson
about her first months as the University’s Vice-Chancellor
OT: You have said you will defend Oxford’s
preeminence in the world. Can you update on that?
LR: Any university is only as good as the academics
and students it can attract. We need to ensure that we
are attracting the best. My job is to create an
environment in which they can do their best work.
As long as we continue to get the best people and
provide that environment, we will remain
preeminent. We’re in an increasingly competitive
world, in which some institutions have better
resources than we do. We need to ensure that we
remain competitive.
OT: There’s a lot of attention being paid to our
admissions system from an equality and diversity
point of view; and then there is a concern you have
already expressed about taking on too much
bureaucracy. What’s your view of these two items?
LR: TEF (The Teaching Excellence Framework) was
part of the Conservative government manifesto, so
I assume this is coming in. Certainly we welcome the
emphasis on teaching, but are very worried about
added bureaucracy; and are concerned about the
accuracy of these matrices, just by dint of the
disparity and differences between institutions. We are
also slightly worried about conflating teaching with
access and fees. These, it seems to me, are separate
issues. On the access front, we do suffer from a
reputation of exclusivity which does not match the
reality I have encountered across the institution since
I’ve arrived. It certainly does not match the genuine
commitment I have encountered from people who
are working hard to address this issue, to attract the
best students, whatever background they come from.
I have been deeply struck by the talent and the
energy devoted to improving the socio-economic
diversity of our student body.
Professor Louise
Richardson,
the 272nd
Vice-Chancellor,
is an expert on
terrorism and
formerly the
Principal of
St Andrews
OT: You met the national press the other week.
Were there any enduring themes?
LR: We discussed the TEF; there is a lot of press
interest in Rhodes, that’s for sure. I think it’s a
distraction from the much more important things
we’ve got to do. It’s unfortunate that it’s occupied so
much press space, rather than some of extraordinary
research being done here. [...]
This is an excerpt of a more extensive interview.
To read the interview please go online
to Oxford Today, using the address:
bit.do/vicechancellor
@oxtoday
9
Inside Oxford News
Inside Oxford
News
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOHN CAIRNS
OUI/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE
Professor Louise Richardson, Oxford’s 272nd Vice-Chancellor, is
welcomed to Oxford in a ceremony held at the Sheldonian theatre
T
WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
he Chancellor, Lord Patten of
Barnes, effusively welcomed
his new Vice-Chancellor at her
admission ceremony: ‘You have an
outstanding record as a teacher and scholar.
I know you will wish to be judged primarily
not by the glass ceilings you have smashed,
but on your achievements.’ After music
sung by the choir of The Queen’s College,
Professor Richardson delivered her
inaugural address. Richardson, former
Principal of St Andrews, defended the
enduring value of higher education and
criticised the current political tendency
to impose more and more bureaucracy on
the sector. She spoke of the ‘increasing cost
of compliance with ever more bureaucratic,
ever more intrusive, and ever less useful
regulation.’ She also endorsed free
speech and diversity.
Rhodes must stay
On 28 January, Oriel’s Governing Body
announced that it would no longer consider
removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes (18531902) overlooking the High, nor the plaque to
him in King Edward Street. A statement noted
that ‘…the recent debate [about whether to
remove the statue] has underlined that the
continuing presence of these historical artefacts
is an important reminder of the complexity of
history and of the legacies of colonialism still
felt today.’ The Oxford University Student Union
criticised Oriel for prioritising the views of alumni
and failing to consult students over their U-turn.
More then 500 letters were received by the
college before the announcement was made.
10
New Oxford train
Chiltern Railways opened a
new, ten-mile railway link from
Kidlington to Bicester, allowing
through trains to London
Marylebone. The new service
opened in late October. While
subjected to various delays, the
final stretch from Kidlington to
Oxford is expected to open in
December. Chiltern deployed
used rolling stock on the new
line, most of which did not have
working Wi-Fi, something the
company said it was working on.
Parliament back
The UK Parliament’s Science
and Technology Select
Committee held a special
meeting in the University’s
Divinity School in front of an
audience of sixth-formers from
across Oxfordshire. It marked
the first meeting of Parliament
in Oxford for more than 300
years. The Committee was
chaired by Nicola Blackwood,
MP for Oxford West & Abingdon,
and took evidence on two
inquiries concerning ‘Science
in Emergencies: UK lessons
from Ebola’ and ‘Big Data
Dilemmas’. The University’s
Department of Medicine played
a central role in developing
a vaccine to treat Ebola.
@oxtoday
OUI/DAVID WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHY
New VC welcomed
BULLETIN
News Inside Oxford
Keble begins work
on new £60m quad
From an eco-unit at the Harcourt Arboretum to the full opening of the
Blavatnik School of Government, 2016 represents another landmark
year for the collegiate University’s buildings
RICHARD MATHER ASSOCIATES
K
OUI/ROB JUDGES
OUI/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE
OUI/CHRISTIAN GUTHIER
eble confirms that work on its
new quadrangle will begin on 1 July.
The site of the build is the former
Acland Hospital, with entrances on
the Woodstock and Banbury Road.
The go-ahead for the build followed the largest
single donation in the history of the college, a
£25million capital grant from the H B Allen
Charitable Trust.
The H B Allen Centre will house 230 graduate
students, doubling Keble’s current capacity,
and add a 120-seat lecture theatre, seminar
rooms, an exhibition space, a café, a gym and
a 24-bedroom ‘research hotel’ for visiting
academics. One occupant of the space will be
Professor Paul Newman’s Mobile Robotics Group.
The University’s Blavatnik School of Government
(BSG) will be formally opened in May having been
founded in 2010, thanks to a £75 million donation
by Russian-American philanthropist Leonard
Blavatnik. The stunning premises on Walton Street
were designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron.
Students and staff have already moved in. There
are currently 117 students from 54 countries in this
year’s cohort for the Master of Public Policy.
Lady Margaret Hall is now approaching the
completion of its site masterplan through the
construction of the Clore Graduate Centre
and new Porter’s Lodge (right, bottom). This
will complete a much older design for the
college and create a new entrance quadrangle
at the end of Norham Road, working partly
from plans dating back to the completion of the
college library in 1961 by progressive classicist
architect Raymond Erith (1904-73).
Other formal openings later this spring include
Magdalen College’s £10 million library extension
and renovation, in Longwall Quad, and the
Weston Library in Broad Street. While the latter
opened to readers a year ago, its formal opening
will be in May, after an extensive renovation
dating back five years and costing £80 million.
Now then, what’s that egg-shaped thing on a
lorry that slightly resembles the tracks of a Great
War-era tank? Developed by Green Unit director
Philip Clayden (Blackfriars, 1995), the carbonneutral eco ‘arc’ is made from Scandinavian larch
with very advanced insulation, triple-glazing and
a sedum roof. It will function as a welcome centre
at the University’s Harcourt Arboretum in the
village of Nuneham Courtenay.
@oxtoday
11
Inside Oxford News
New Year Honours
Chancellor’s Court
of Benefactors
Five members of the University were recognised
in the 2016 New Year Honours
The following new members were admitted to
the Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors (CCB)
at a ceremony at the Sheldonian during
Michaelmas Term.
Professor Christopher Bulstrode, Emeritus Professor
of Orthopaedic Surgery and Emeritus Fellow of Green
Templeton College, has been appointed CBE for services
to humanitarian medicine. Professor Bulstrode, who was
Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University and
a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the John Radcliffe
Hospital and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre from
1982 until his retirement in 2010, was honoured for his
work with Doctors of the World. The charity provides
medical care to people affected by war, natural disasters,
disease, hunger, poverty or exclusion around the world.
Professor Bulstrode has worked with the organisation
in countries including Afghanistan, Haiti, Nepal,
Palestine, Sierra Leone and Ukraine.
The Court, which now has more than 200
members, celebrates and recognises those friends
and supporters who have been outstandingly
generous towards the collegiate University.
Dr David R Harvey, philanthropist, former CEO
and Board Chairman of Sigma-Aldrich Corporation.
Irene Yun Lien Lee, Chairman of the Hysan
Development Company Ltd, representing
the Lee family.
Christian Levett, Senior Portfolio Manager,
Moore Capital LLP.
R Victor Wood, philanthropist, former director
of Worldwide and General Investment Co
Fran Bennett, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow
at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention,
has been appointed OBE for services to social science.
She has a particular interest in social security policy,
gender issues, and poverty, income distribution and
participation. In addition to her role at Oxford,
she is also an independent consultant, and has
written extensively on social policy issues for the UK
government, non-governmental organisations and
others. She is one of the UK independent experts on
social inclusion for the European Commission.
Mark Campbell, Partner, Clifford Chance,
representing Clifford Chance.
René Olivieri, former CEO of Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, and current Chair of the Wildlife Trusts,
representing the Tubney Charitable Trust.
Professor Ric Parker, CBE, Director of Research
and Technology, Rolls Royce Plc, representing
Rolls Royce Plc.
In 2009, the University created the Chancellor’s
Court of Benefactors Fellowship to distinguish
those members of the Court who have provided
exceptional philanthropic funding to Oxford.
Professor Linda McDowell, FBA, Professor of Human
Geography and Fellow of St John’s College, has been
appointed CBE for services to geography and higher
education. She is an economic geographer interested
in the connections between economic restructuring,
labour market change and class and gender divisions
in the United Kingdom. She has been at the forefront
in the development of feminist perspectives on
contemporary social and economic change, as well as
in the development of feminist methodologies.
At the ceremony in Michaelmas Term,
Dr Marcy McCall MacBain, Co-Founder,
McCall MacBain Foundation, was admitted
as a CCB Fellow. The current group of Fellows
numbers 17.
New Heads of House
The Revd Canon Brian Mountford, Vicar of the
University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Fellow and
Chaplain of St Hilda’s College, and Honorary Canon
of Christ Church Cathedral, has been appointed MBE
for services to ecclesiastical history. He is interested in
modern philosophy and theology, particularly questions
of faith and doctrine, and gives seminars on leadership
and ethics in corporate life for the SaÏd Business School
and the Academy for Leadership in the Netherlands.
12
Miles Young, Chairman and CEO
of the communications group,
Ogilvy and Mather, has been
appointed Warden with effect
from the end of August.
EURATOM/CCFE FUSION ASSOCIATION
Professor Keith Willett, FRCS, Professor of
Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery, Fellow of Wolfson
College and Director for Acute Care at NHS England,
has been appointed CBE for services to the NHS. An
NHS consultant surgeon for 24 years, Professor Willett
has a particular research interest in the care of the
multiple-injured patient, acetabular and pelvic fractures,
fractures in the elderly, limb fracture surgery, fracture
biomechanics, accident prevention and clinical outcome
studies of orthopœdic trauma surgery techniques.
New College
Corpus Christi College
Professor Steven Cowley, FRS,
chief executive of the UK Atomic
Energy Authority, leader of its
laboratory at Culham, Oxfordshire,
and Professor of Physics at
Imperial College, London, has
been appointed President with
effect from 1 October.
@oxtoday
Shaping the world The big picture
The big picture
14
@oxtoday
Beauty in bacteria
This may be the prettiest Petri dish you’ve
ever seen. Growing on the surface of this
agar slab are three common bacteria that
helpfully inhabit your gut: purple E. coli,
turquoise Citrobacter, and dark blue
Klebsiella. Each dot is a single colony
containing millions of bacteria.
Created by Dr Nicola Fawcett from the
Nuffield Department of Medicine, with
help from artist Anna Dumitriu, it
continues a strong tradition of agar art:
Alexander Fleming famously used to
‘paint’ in his Petri dishes.
But the piece drips with meaning as well
as bacteria. There are two discs of
cartridge paper on the surface, each
loaded with antibiotics. One, labelled
AMC for Co-amoxiclav, kills off the purple
E. coli but not the other bacteria, which
have evolved resistance to the drug.
The other, labelled MEM for Meropenem,
kills all but the dark blue Klebsiella.
‘Think of your gut as a garden of bacteria,’
explains Dr Fawcett. ‘Taking antibiotics is
like spreading weedkiller, killing off the
good stuff as well as the bad.’ This could
make it easier for more invasive,
antibiotic-resistant bacteria to take
over, putting you at increased risk
of infection in the future.
An ongoing study being run at the
John Radcliffe Hospital is attempting
to understand exactly how
antibiotics affect the delicate
balance of microbes in the gut.
@oxtoday
CHRIS WOOD, OXFORD MEDICAL ILLUSTRATION AND NICOLA FAWCETT, LIVINGINAMICROBIALWORLD.WORDPRESS.COM
Find out more about the study:
armordstudy.wordpress.com
15
Feel like a trip down
memory lane?
Keble College
Radcliffe Camera
Christ Church
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Research Shaping the world
Research
Transcribing
Shakespeare’s world
On the 400th anniversary of his death, a new research
project is seeking volunteers to get online and transcribe
handwritten documents of Shakespeare’s contemporaries,
to help understand his life and times
FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY
Pages from the
17th-century
receipt book of
Margaret Baker
BULLETIN
Ill humour
A new study by researchers
from Oxford’s Cancer
Epidemiology Unit shows that
although being ill can make you
unhappy, being unhappy or
stressed doesn’t itself make
you ill. The team asked
700,000 British women about
their health and happiness,
then tracked them for a decade.
Those already in poor health at
the start of the study tended
to be unhappy, but for those
in good health unhappiness
and stress were irrelevant to
the ten-year risk of death.
Co-author Professor Sir
Richard Peto said: ‘People got
causes and effects mixed up.’
T
he new website, called
Shakespeare’s World, is a
collaboration between online
academic crowdsourcing platform
Zooniverse.org at Oxford University, the
Oxford English Dictionary and the Early
Modern Manuscripts Online project at the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,
DC. The Folger contains an extensive
collection of early modern handwritten
documents, including many that date to
Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564–1616). Many
images are freely accessible on Folger’s
online catalogue, but their text cannot be
searched. ‘You can put digital images of
texts online, but if they’re not indexed or
transcribed it’s not very helpful,’ explains
Dr Victoria Van Hyning, who led the
research and design of the project.
Shakespeare’s World builds on the
successes of Zooniverse, which allows
volunteers to take an active part in research.
In this case, they’re tasked with reading
and transcribing written texts from the era.
‘Instead of asking volunteers to do an entire
page, though, they can do as much or as
little as they want,’ explains Van Hyning.
The first set of documents includes letters
and pages from recipe (or, in the writing of
the time, ‘receipt’) books. The team plans to
add family papers, legal documents, poetry
and unpublished plays to the collection.
‘These documents were written by a whole
spectrum of society,’ explains Van Hyning,
‘from literate people in the lower classes to
kings and queens of England.’
The newly transcribed documents, which
will be hosted by the Folger, will make it
easier for academics to identify words,
phrases, dates of interest and the like.
New words and spellings are already being
identified, and will gradually be considered
for inclusion in the OED. Meanwhile, lively
debate is taking place on the project’s
discussion forum, where users can
nominate recipes to try or ask about
ingredients. Van Hyning has already made
an apple marmalade from one document.
To get involved, visit the website and press
‘Get Started’. You can transcribe as much or
as little of a document as you choose – but
either way, you’ll be making a contribution
to the scholarly study of Shakespeare and
his contemporaries.
@oxtoday
ROGER CLOSE
Read the paper:
bit.do/Unhappiness
Three fossils
become one
Researchers from the
Department of Earth Sciences
have identified a tiny
170-million-year-old fossil on
the Isle of Skye and concluded
that fossils found just ten miles
from Oxford belong to one
ancient creature, not three as
previously suspected. The
team found the 11-toothed
lower jaw on a dig; inspection
using high-resolution scans
showed that differences in
tooth shape, thought to
distinguish three different
species, were all present in one
sample. They’ve identified their
find as Palaeoxonodon ooliticus.
Read the paper:
bit.do/SkyeFossil
17
Shaping the world Research
Making light work
B
ISIS INNOVATION
odle Technologies, founded
by Professor Harish Bhaskaran
and Dr Peiman Hosseini, is
exploiting the optical properties
of the same phase-change materials that
are used in rewritable DVDs. The
material can be made to assume
an amorphous state, like glass, or
a crystalline state, like metal, by using
a one-off electrical pulse. When made
into a thin layer, the two different states
can cause light hitting the surface to
behave in different ways depending on
its thickness – allowing light to pass
straight through, say, or reflecting it
as intensely saturated colours.
The company is investigating how a
thin film of the material could be used in
smart glazing to control the transmission
of infrared light through a pane of glass.
While many windows now have infraredblocking coatings, an appropriately
designed phase-change film – tuned to a
thickness to block just certain frequencies
of light – could be used to turn the same
ability on and off with a single electrical
pulse. ‘In summer you’d keep the heat out
to save on air conditioning, in winter
you’d let heat in,’ explains Hosseini.
The company also hopes to extend
dramatically the battery life of your
18
smartphone. The bulk of your phone
battery’s charge is used to power
the backlight of the screen which
is required to see the colour of
the pixels. By replacing the pixels
in the screen with those made
from the phase-change material,
the backlight would barely be
required, as ambient light would
be reflected to produce rich,
full-colour images. The only
power requirement would be
the small electrical pulses
required to switch the states
of pixel themselves.
Bodle, only launched in
November 2015, is the second
company to be funded by Oxford
Sciences Innovation – a new
£320m investment company
established to back Oxford
spin-outs. ‘Right now, I think
Oxford is one of the best places
in the world to be working in
technology innovation,’ says Hosseini.
While it’s still early days for Bodle, the
company is already talking to large
display and glazing companies about the
commercialisation of its technology.
Find out more:
bodletechnologies.com
Celtic, not?
Celtic art, traditionally seen as a
European art style, could be linked
to artistic traditions across Eurasia
in the first millennium BC.
A study led by researchers from
the School of Archaeology seeks to
explore these relationships by
examining the forms and
ornamentation of fine metalwork
in bronze, gold and silver from
Ireland to the borders of China.
‘We are setting up a new database
of Celtic art materials in Europe,
and we’re also thinking more
broadly about connections
between different modes of
representation across Europe and
Asia,’ explains Professor Chris
Gosden. ‘We suspect that this
imagery was part of a world where
the boundaries between people,
animals, plants, and objects were
blurred, which makes these styles
interestingly different from the
more familiar, realistic art of the
classical Mediterranean.’
@oxtoday
© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
A new spin-out company from the Department of Materials
Science promises mobile phone screens that use almost no
power by harnessing ambient light – and smart glazing that
can block or transmit heat as required
Research Shaping the world
W
hen natural history
specimens arrive at
a museum, they
don’t have a name.
Instead, they’re placed into
archives and gradually studied by
a resident naturalist who attempts
to identify them by referring to
existing records. Sadly, that
process can and does go wrong,
which is a problem.
‘The biological sciences are
underpinned by accurate naming,’
explains Dr Robert Scotland.
‘Without accurate names,
specimens don’t correspond to
the reality outside.’
Working with researchers
from the Royal Botanic Garden
Edinburgh, Robert and his team
has carried out a study to
determine just how bad the
situation is for the case of tropical
flowering plants. They used three
different techniques to investigate
incorrect naming. One approach
saw them investigate how the
names of 4,500 separate
specimens of the African ginger
genus Aframomum held in
collections changed over time.
A second identified how identical
samples of Dipterocarpaceae,
a family of rainforest trees from
Asia, were given conflicting names
by in-house experts when sent to
different collections. And a final
approach saw them identify
ROYAL BOTANIC GARDEN EDINBURGH
As many as half of
all natural history
specimens held in the
world’s museums could
be incorrectly named,
according to a new study
led by researchers from
the Department of
Plant Sciences
mistakes contained within
aggregated records stored online.
In each case the team found that
around 50% of the samples they
considered were incorrectly named.
Sadly, the finding may be
indicative of a much larger
problem. Of 1.8m different
described species on Earth,
350,000 are flowering plants and
a further 950,000 are insects.
While Scotland and his team have
shown that the names of flowering
plants are commonly incorrect,
other researchers have shown that
the insect kingdom is potentially in
an even worse situation. ‘We think
a conservative estimate is that up
to half the world’s natural history
specimens could be incorrectly
named,’ says Zoë Goodwin,
another of the researchers.
The problem, the team claims,
is caused by a lack of concerted
time and research devoted to the
accurate identification of names
across entire plant families.
They point out that digitised
specimens, as well as DNA
sequencing, could help ease
the problem, but only if they’re
integrated alongside committed
taxonomic research efforts.
@oxtoday
After the gold rush
A spin-out company from the
University has created the
most expensive material on
Earth, which costs £100m per
gram. The substance, created
by Designer Carbon Materials
Ltd, is based upon spherical
carbon molecules known as
fullerenes – hollow balls that
are made of 60 or more carbon
atoms. The new carbon cages
encapsulate another atom such
as nitrogen, making them what
Dr Kyriakos Porfyrakis, the
academic founder of Designer
Carbon Materials, calls
‘endohedral fullerenes’.
The molecules can be used to
keep accurate track of time,
for possible use in the world’s
first portable atomic clocks.
Find out more:
designercarbon.com
LONGJOURNEYS/SHUTTERSTOCK
A problem
with names
GREG SMOLONSKI/PHOTOVIBE
BULLETIN
Can we trust
that this
species is
described
correctly?
Out of the blue
ONLINE
Read the paper:
bit.do/
IncorrectNames
Keen sailors will have heard
tales of ‘walls of water’
that appear from nowhere
– but most academics have
dismissed the idea, claiming
that they should be visible
some way off. Now, a team
of researchers from the
Department of Engineering
Science has performed a
series of calculations to
understand how waves
propagate through deep
water in the open ocean, and
it seems the mariners may
have been right after all.
‘If you’re the observer on a ship,
rather than seeing a gradual
build-up of waves, the rogue
wave will come seemingly
out of nowhere,’ explains
Professor Thomas Adcock.
‘This happens because large
waves tend to move to the front
of the wave group.’
Read the paper:
bit.do/RogueWaves
19
Shaping the world Oxonians
Oxonians
Oxford School
of Drama
founder
George Peck
JESSICA FORDE
St Catherine’s, 1975
After graduating from St. Catz, George
Peck, founder and principal of the Oxford
School of Drama, enjoyed a successful
theatrical career, a passion first nurtured
during his university years. ‘I remember
when Yvonne Mitchell, who was a big star of
the RSC in the 1950s, came to Oxford and
directed a show. She set rigorous
professional standards, which were a shock
to the system for all of us. For me, this was
the transition between having a good time
in the theatre and becoming an actor.’
Peck landed a job in a repertory
company after graduation, then, after
taking advantage of an Arts Council-funded
trainee director scheme, he climbed the
ranks to become an associate director.
The experience laid the foundations for
establishing his own drama school in 1986.
‘I started to see how desperate actors
were for any sort of job, but also there
seemed to be a complete lack of
responsibility towards their craft. When
I set up the Oxford School of Drama I also
wanted to give students a love of the art
form and its potential and to take some
responsibility for its future.’
Now one of the UK’s top five drama
schools, Peck believes the secret of the
Oxford School of Drama’s success is
staying small and independent, inspired
by the kind of teaching he experienced for
himself at the University. ‘We’re now one of
the only recognised drama schools that
doesn’t offer a degree, which means we are
not honour-bound to follow any particular
academic path and can attract students
purely on their native ability. But the course
is rigorous enough to bring people to a level
of understanding that’s equal to that of
a university degree.
‘What attracts people to our school is
that we give a training to sustain a lifetime
as an actor,’ he adds. ‘You may be a pretty
face at 21 but with the right training and
attitude you can still be working at 31, 41, 51
and beyond. We had a 61-year-old woman
on our course who ended up in a Dustin
Hoffman film.’
Oxonians Shaping the world
Teacher of
conflict history
Michael
Davies
Conservation campaigner
Christ Church,
1977
Belinda Stewart-Cox
When history teacher Michael
Davies took students on a trip
to Israel and the West Bank, it
was part of his plan to tackle
the difficulty of teaching the
history of the conflict in
Palestine and Israel. ‘People
are so afraid of saying the
wrong thing that often they say
nothing at all,’ he says. Davies
had been to Palestine and
Israel on a Winston Churchill
Memorial Trust fellowship to
talk to academics about how
they teach their histories. He
later came up with an idea for
a website-based resource for
schools. ‘My objective isn’t to
bring both sides together to
create a unified history, but to
encourage people to take a
peek over the wall and see
what the other side is saying.’
religious symbol in Thailand, as well
as being a landscape species.’
After almost three decades in
Thailand, Stewart-Cox is now home
in the UK, remaining involved in
Asian elephant conservation as a
trustee of Mark Shand’s Elephant
Family NGO.
In 2011, her contribution to
conservation in Thailand was
acknowledged by an OBE.
Belinda
Stewart-Cox
works to protect
Thailand’s
important places
and species
Media equity
analyst
LIBERUM
Human Sciences graduate Belinda
Stewart-Cox originally went to
Thailand for a three-month research
project on the green peafowl in the
Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary.
‘It was like falling in love, but with
a place and a project rather than
a person,’ she says.
She later helped defeat the Nam
Choan Hydro-Dam proposal in 1988
and the revised law allowing loggers
into wildlife sanctuaries in 1989,
and wrote Thailand’s nomination
for Thungyai-Huai Kha Khaeng to
become, in 1991, the first natural
World Heritage Site in mainland
southeast Asia. ‘As part of the
Nam Choan Hydro-Dam campaign
I contributed a major cover story
to The Ecologist and the campaign
went global,’ she says. ‘Winning that
campaign was a watershed moment
for conservation in Thailand.’
In 1999, Stewart-Cox developed
a project that became the Elephant
Conservation Network in 2005:
‘Elephants are a national, royal and
ELEPHANT CONSERVATION NETWORK
LMH, 1981
Fantasy author
Ian Whittaker
Hertford, 1989
Samantha Shannon
Few undergraduates have to juggle
revising for Finals with editing and
publicising their first novel, and
author Samantha Shannon admits
it was tough balancing life at Oxford
with her fledgling career as a high
fantasy novelist: ‘I had to fly to New
York suddenly on the last day of
teaching before Finals, which
probably didn’t impress my tutors.’
As an undergraduate, Shannon
secured a deal with Bloomsbury for
seven books about clairvoyants set
in the future. The first, The Bone
Season, was published in 2013, and
plans are afoot for a film version.
Shannon says that her university
experiences contributed a variety
of ideas, and Oxford plays a role as
a prison city. ‘I started wondering
what it would be like if there were
a society of clairvoyants living in
MARK PRINGLE
St Anne’s, 2010
a dystopian London. I rolled that
together with an idea about
supernatural creatures being in
charge of Oxford.’
One thing that Shannon could
never have predicted is becoming a
New York Times and Sunday Times
best-selling author at the age of 21:
‘I still can’t believe it’s happened.’
The third instalment, The Song
Rising, is out in November.
www.samantha-shannon.
blogspot.co.uk
@oxtoday
At just 21,
Samantha
Shannon’s
books have
hit best-seller
lists around
the world
First nominated for the
award in 2013, Ian Whittaker,
Liberum’s lead equity analyst
in the media sector, scooped
the prestigious CityAM Analyst
of the Year accolade in 2014 for
his distinctive calls. ‘We’d said
the top buy in the sector was
ITV; our top sell was Financial
Times owner Pearson. Both
turned out to be good calls,’
he says. The award is the
fruition of 16 years’ experience
in equity research. ‘You have
to look ahead to see where
companies and the industry
are going, as this drives where
to invest,’ he says. ‘It’s exciting
to put your capabilities and
experience out there and say:
“I believe in this.” On the down
side, if you get your calls
wrong, everyone will know!’
21
Alumni Voices Shaping the world
Alumni Voices
Guy Collender hatches a new podcast series by asking existing
fellows and alumni how Oxford shaped their careers
A
In her interview, Susan Greenfield, Baroness
Greenfield, CBE (St Hilda’s, 1970), a renowned
neuroscientist, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford
and Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College,
explains her unorthodox route to a scientific career.
Having passed the Oxford entrance exam in Classics,
and having studied Psychology and Philosophy as an
undergraduate, Baroness Greenfield developed
her abiding interest in studying the brain.
Supported by her tutor Dr Jane Mellanby,
she embarked upon becoming a neuroscientist
and a DPhil in Pharmacology followed.
There are also other examples of unusual career
paths nourished by the curiosity and adaptability
fostered by an Oxford education, rather than
planned careerism. The interviewees describe
how being challenged during tutorials, being
inspired by their tutors, and being exposed to
interdisciplinary approaches have prepared
them for their varied professional lives.
As Greenfield says: ‘To see connections
between disciplines is really rewarding and
fulfilling, and it does get you to what we could
regard as the truth.’
The Rt Hon Lord Patten
of Barnes, CH (Balliol, 1962),
Chancellor of the University of
Oxford and the last governor
of Hong Kong, did not have
political ambitions while studying
Modern History. He says: ‘I wasn’t
destined for a career in politics in
any sense. I was hoping to work
in broadcasting.’
However, the independent
thinking fostered by the tutorial
system helped prepare him for
high office. Patten adds: ‘I think it
was that ability or encouragement
to stand up for my own political
opinions which made much more
of an impact on my political life
than anything I learnt about the
consequences of the Thirty Years’
War.’ Juliet Davenport, OBE
(Merton, 1986), founder and CEO
of leading renewable energy firm
Good Energy, traces her passion
for renewable energy back to a
‘Eureka’ moment in the Physics
Labs at Oxford when she realised
the sensitivity of the climate. Until
then she’d been a fan of cars and driving, and not
an environmentalist.
Other Alumni Voices interviewees, who include
bestselling writer and champion of evidence-based
medicine Dr Ben Goldacre (Magdalen, 1992),
Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the University’s
Nuffield Department of Primary Health Sciences;
Louise Chantal (Lincoln, 1987), Director and CEO
of the Oxford Playhouse; and Mark Goldring CBE
(Keble, 1976), Chief Executive of Oxfam,
speak about their distinguished careers and
returning to Oxford for their work.
@oxtoday
JOHN LAWRENCE
ccording to John Lennon, ‘Life is what
happens to you while you’re busy making
other plans.’ The poignant lyrics from
the 1980 song Beautiful Boy also apply to
many alumni, as early interests in certain subjects
have evolved into successful careers in other areas.
Such fascinating stories have been shared by
former students in Alumni Voices – a new podcast
series. From medicine and politics to the arts and
renewable energy, individuals have shared the
unexpected twists and turns in their lives in the
15-minute audio programmes.
Left: Susan
Greenfield
Ben Goldacre
Louise Chantal
Juliet Davenport
ONLINE
To listen to
Alumni Voices
visit: bit.do/
alumni-voices
23
Shaping the world Alumni diary
Host a micro-internship
and help a student
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE
Alumni are taking part in new initiatives to boost students’
skills and employability, says Guy Collender
DIA RY
Professional
Networking:
International
Development
28 April, 6:30pm-9:30pm,
BNY Mellon, Blackfriars,
London
Join fellow alumni and an expert
panel from some of the world’s
leading NGOs at the first
alumni professional networking
event hosted by BNY Mellon.
11 May, 6:30pm-9:30pm,
M Shed, Bristol
Enjoy an evening with other
Oxonians in the heart of
historic Bristol and hear from
Prof Irene Tracey on ‘Seeing
Inside Your Brain: Uses and
Abuses of Neuroimaging’.
Alexandra Landucci did her week-long micro-internship at the Ashmolean Museum
M
ore than 30 organisations
provided one-week internships
for Oxford students at the end
of Michaelmas term as part of
the innovative Micro-Internship Programme
run by the University’s Careers Service.
The success of the short-term work
placements means they will now run at the
end of every term, and they are expected
to grow rapidly in popularity.
So far, the short format has been
particularly popular with female students,
who have submitted two-thirds of the
applications. Lasting from two to five days
and taking place in Oxfordshire and
London, micro-internships are convenient
and accessible for students wanting to
gain a concise insight into an industry.
They also offer employers the chance to
benefit from the input of bright, hardworking students at minimal cost (travel
and lunch expenses).
Undergraduate Alexandra Landucci
(Regent’s Park, 2014) gained a commercial
understanding of the heritage sector from
her week at the Ashmolean Museum.
She says: ‘The micro-internship was both
valuable for my career development and
a hugely enjoyable experience. I can’t
recommend it enough.’
24
To date, more than 4,000 alumni have
also volunteered to be mentors via the
Oxford Alumni Community – an online
professional networking platform. To begin
with, the platform was only for alumni,
but students can now search for mentors
by many criteria, including industry,
location, degree and college.
Alumni are also responding to calls to
help even younger members of the next
generation. Around 50 alumni are
supporting Classics for All – a pioneering
project to promote Classics at state-run
primary and secondary schools in deprived
areas. Among other activities, volunteers
mentor teachers and run after-school
Classics clubs. Half of the charity’s highprofile patrons studied Classics at Oxford,
including Boris Johnson (Balliol, 1983),
Mayor of London, and Martha Kearney
(St Anne’s, 1976), journalist and broadcaster.
For more information about offering
a micro-internship visit:
bit.do/micro-internship
To become a mentor join the Oxford Alumni
Community at: oxfordalumnicommunity.org
For more information about
Classics for All visit: classicsforall.org.uk
Alumni Board
nominations
30 May, deadline!
The University’s Alumni Board is
looking for four new members
to serve a four year term. The
Board serves an advisory role,
providing input into alumni
relations strategy and acting as
a conduit for communicating
alumni opinion. If you’re
interested in putting your name
forward for consideration,
visit the Board’s website at
bit.do/nomination-deadline
Tenth Anniversary
Oxford Alumni Weekend
16-18 September, Oxford
Speakers confirmed include
Sir David Normington,
First Civil Service
Commissioner; comedian
Ruby Wax; Mara Yamauchi,
marathon runner.
Booking opens in June.
For updates, visit
www.alumniweekend.ox.ac.uk
Please visit bit.do/oxevents
for the most up-to-date
information about all
Oxford alumni events.
@oxtoday
OUI/JOHN CAIRNS
Alumni reception
in Bristol
go behind the scenes in
pompeii & herculaneum
For over 30 years, Andante Travels has been the UK’s leading provider of Archaeology tours. We are delighted to be working
with Oxford and Cambridge Universities to offer a programme of fascinating cultural holidays to the ancient world, exclusively for
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pompeii - lives of the romans with Dr Damian Robinson
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Join this in-depth, illuminating exploration of the world’s best-preserved Roman cities. Visits include a full day
at Pompeii, the opulent but little-known villas of Oplontis, and the galleries at Naples Museum. The tour is led
by Oxford University Lecturer in Archaeology, Dr Damian Robinson, who co-directed excavations at Pompeii
for more than a decade. From slaves to Caesars, brothels to amphitheatres, take a haunting journey into the
ordinary life and extraordinary disaster of 2,000 years ago. 5 Days | 20th Sep - 24th Sep 2016 | From £1,675
Albania - The Story of Illyria - Cambridge & Oxford
Universities Joint Tour with Gillian Gloyer
Travel from the shores of the Adriatic high up into the
Albanian mountains. This is a country, like no other in
Europe and remains very much off the mainstream tourist
trail. Journey through the ancient coastal city of Butrint,
to the attractive medieval town of Berat with Gillian Gloyer, author of the
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We are delighted to offer fascinating
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Feature Nuclear fusion
Bottling the sun
Alexi Baker explores the century-long dream of
nuclear fusion power, and Oxford’s role in it
F
or almost a century, humanity has dreamed
of harnessing the power of the stars. Nuclear
fusion, the reaction which fuels the sun,
remains of keen interest even today as
a possible solution to ever-increasing energy demands
and to the threat posed by climate change. In recent
years, Europe, Russia and North America have been
joined in the global pursuit of fusion power by more
recent superpowers including China, India, Japan and
South Korea. Within the past year alone, key fusion
centres in the UK, including Culham near Oxford,
have opened important new facilities, and the largest
‘stellarator’ reactor in the world opened in Germany.
Scientists first realised that stars are fuelled by
nuclear fusion in the 1920s and have tried to trigger
and trap the reaction on Earth efficiently ever since.
This is much harder to accomplish without the
immense gravitational forces found in the interior of
a star. Culham achieved the first controlled release of
fusion power in 1991. Since these precedents, glowing
spheres and doughnuts of ultra-hot gas have flickered
in and out of existence around the world. However, so
far these fallen stars eat too much energy and flicker
and die too quickly to be commercially viable. Yet many
nations continue to pursue self-sustaining fusion power
– despite project costs running into billions of pounds.
‘People are so excited about fusion, and that has
persisted, because it is an enormous potential source
of clean energy from tiny densities of material,’
explains Professor Roger Cashmore, CMG, FRS,
Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy
Authority (UKAEA) and former Director of Research
and Deputy Director General at CERN. Cashmore was
previously Professor of Experimental Physics and
Principal of Brasenose College at Oxford. ‘The energy
released during fusion is colossal compared with even
fission, with ten to 30 times more released in one fusion
than in one uranium fission. There are also tonnes
of exciting problems to deal with, intellectually and
technically, plus a fantastic goal at the end – the
potential of unlimited, clean, sustainable energy.’
The tremendous power of nuclear fusion rests on the
ability of even small amounts of matter to contain large
amounts of energy, as Einstein famously quantified
in his equation E=mc2 in 1905. In this case, energy
is contained within the nucleus, a dense region of
26
protons and neutrons at the centre of each atom
which was discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford
and his colleagues at Cambridge. Vast amounts
of energy are released in stars when the nuclei of
hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium nuclei,
because of a loss of mass. This reaction takes place
within an electrically conductive form of matter known
as plasma, which forms from gas subjected to strong
heat or electromagnetism. Plasma, common in space
but naturally rare on Earth, can be created in the lab.
The fuels used in most fusion plasmas, two forms of
hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium, can be
extracted from seawater and the Earth’s crust.
‘Fusion has the potential to replace almost every
other source of energy,’ says Professor Steven Cowley,
FRS, of Imperial College London and Head of Culham
Centre for Fusion Energy. ‘Its fuel is so abundant that
we could power the planet for at least 30 million years.’
It is truly the ultimate source of energy, and there
is a collective belief and hope that it will become
commercially available in the second half of this
century, no doubt fanned along by urgent concerns
about climate change.
The UK has long been an important contributor to
fusion research. British scientists were involved in the
elucidation of stellar fusion in the 1920s, and then
pursued it in the laboratory during the following
decade. Mark Oliphant, an Australian, achieved the
first experimental demonstration while working with
Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge’s
Cavendish Laboratory at the beginning of the 1930s.
G P Thomson and Moses Blackman of Imperial
College London patented the ‘Z-pinch’ fusion system
in 1946, which applied a large voltage to hydrogen
gas in order to produce plasma. Another early pioneer,
at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory in the 1940s, was
Australian Peter Thonemann.
Oxford’s role grew as a consequence of the Atomic
Energy Research Establishment being established at
Harwell, near Didcot, in 1946, its burgeoning fusion
work decanted to a laboratory at Culham, just six miles
south of Oxford, in 1965, and re-named the Culham
Centre for Fusion Energy in 2009.
The trouble with the early attempts at fusion was
their inability to contain the plasma. ‘Magnetic fields
are like lines in space that pull in and keep the hot
@oxtoday
Nuclear fusion Feature
‘Fusion has the potential to
replace almost every other source
of energy. Its fuel is so abundant
that we could power the planet
for at least 30 million years’
NASA
Below: the sun generates its energy by nuclear fusion
Right: internal view of the JET tokamak at Culham
@oxtoday
27
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ITER
Nuclear fusion Feature
plasma fuel off of the walls of the device,’ says Cowley,
who is also president-elect of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford. ‘In the early days it was like trying to hold
a lump of jelly in with pieces of string, and like jelly,
the plasma just oozed its way out and blew against
the wall.’
It was because of such obstacles that international
dialogue blossomed even across Cold War lines.
Although UK research was classified for most of the
1950s after the discovery of a Soviet spy, Thonemann
received a visit from the head of the Soviet nuclear
programme, Igor Kurchatov, at Harwell in 1956.
Thonemann and his team opened the largest fusion
reactor in the world there a year later, the Zero
Energy Thermonuclear Assembly (ZETA), employing
Z-pinch technology, but it was quickly succeeded by a Soviet invention, a fusion device
known as the tokamak, to this day the most
common focus of most fusion centres in the
UK and elsewhere.
A tokamak uses electrical currents and
magnetic fields to produce and confine the
hot plasma for fusion. Like the early pinch
systems, they are most often shaped like
a torus or doughnut, in order to avoid the
loss of particles and energy out of an openended machine.
After Culham confirmed the Soviet success, it
was chosen to host the Joint European Torus (JET)
tokamak, which went into operation in 1983 and is still
the world’s largest magnetic confinement device for
plasma. JET creates plasma by heating gas with an
electric current, which is then caged within vertical
and horizontal magnetic fields that are produced by
two sets of coils. The plasma is further heated by an
injection of high-speed particles whose energy it can
absorb, and by high-frequency oscillating electrical
currents, until it reaches at least 100 million degrees
Celsius – hotter than the sun.
The extraordinary technology of JET has achieved
a number of firsts during its working life. It first
demonstrated a controlled release of fusion energy in
1991, and it achieved an unprecedented power output
of 16 megawatts six years later. Cowley maintains that
Culham is ‘still the world’s leading lab in fusion’,
employing around 600 people and conducting from
The ITER
facility under
construction in
southern France;
35 nations are
collaborating to
build the world’s
largest tokamak
20 to 25 brief plasma reactions across a 15-hour day.
The results contribute to a valuable hoard of data.
Culham will continue to operate JET on behalf of
fusion researchers around Europe until its planned
closure in the 2020s, testing technologies for use in
the much larger International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER). ITER began
construction in 2010 in the south of France and may
be finished within about a decade. The endeavour has
already cost more than £9.4 billion from the European
Union, the United States, South Korea, India, Japan,
China and Russia. ITER, which will be able to contain
800 cubic meters of plasma as compared to 80 cubic
meters in JET, is intended to prove the feasibility of
a self-sustained fusion electrical plant before the
building of actual commercial plants. If successful,
it will be the first tokamak to consume less energy than
it produces – consuming 50 megawatts of power and
producing ten times more.
‘It will be the largest fusion device ever built but also
the largest science collaboration ever, and a very large
fraction of the world’s GDP is involved in this research,’
says Dr Jérôme Paméla, who heads the host state agency
as Director of Agence Iter France. It remains to be seen
whether fusion power will continue to be characterised
by such international cooperation, or whether the
participating nations will strike out on their own
should ITER prove successful. Despite spiralling costs,
fusion scientists point to its almost limitless value.
‘Look at everything we rely on for electricity: our
day-to-day standard of living, all manufacturing
processes, and national security. As energy sources
start running out, the world may not look a pretty place
– in view of that, I think ITER is a bargain,’ says
Professor Howard Wilson, Director of the York
Plasma Institute and of the EPSRC Centre for
Fusion Doctoral Training, which includes
Oxford and works closely with Culham.
Many major obstacles remain on the path
to commercially viable fusion power. Perhaps
most importantly, fusion needs to be made
self-sustaining, so that it can be fuelled by
high-energy particles produced during the
reaction rather than by constant injections
of outside energy. ‘We have got to be able turn
off the input power to the reactor and have it
still keep running – the holy grail of fusion,’
summarises Cashmore.
Another key challenge is perfecting the materials
used to make fusion devices. Even though tokamaks
‘cage’ hot plasma within electromagnetic fields, their
physical walls are still subjected to a damaging
bombardment of high-energy neutron particles.
‘Over time, this means the materials in a fusion
power station will get weaker and more brittle,’ explains
Martin O’Brien, Head of Theory and Modelling at
Culham. ‘Here we try to develop models to explain
this, while researchers at Oxford are also deliberately
damaging the materials in order to examine them
under different conditions.’
Early this year Culham opened an important new
Materials Research Facility, directly evidencing the
University’s strength in the field of materials science –
led by Professors Chris Grovenor, Patrick Grant and
‘The trouble with
the early attempts
at fusion at such
locations was their
inability to contain
the plasma’
@oxtoday
MAIN IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
29
Steve Roberts, among others. The University’s expertise
has informed Culham’s choice of equipment, in turn
used by researchers and students from the University
to study everything from reactor materials to seashells
recording ocean acidification.
For example, the facility will be able to produce
samples of radioactive material so small that they
can be used in repetitive tests, and can even be safely
carried home in a briefcase. ‘Otherwise, you would
have to go to Sellafield for radioactive samples,
which would be more expensive and time-consuming
as it is a nuclear licensed site,’ says Dr Chris Hardie,
a mechanical engineer at Culham who has helped
develop the new facility. Hardie completed a DPhil in
Materials at Oxford in 2013, while at Linacre College.
The samples produced and the tests run in the hot
cells and shielded rooms at Culham will help to
further research on fusion power and on today and
tomorrow’s nuclear power stations around the UK.
In order to become commercially feasible, fusion
reactors will need to become much smaller in the
future. One approach to that problem is to concentrate
on spherical rather than toroidal tokamaks. In these,
magnetic fields more tightly confine the plasma to
a sphere shape. Culham itself operated two different
spherical tokamaks in 1991, and local company
Tokamak Energy continues to research spherical
technology. Dr David Kingham, its Chief Executive,
says that the company ‘is pursuing the goal of fusion
‘It’s very difficult to do, which
makes it really fascinating
and great fun for scientists’
power by focusing on compact spherical tokamaks with
high-temperature superconducting magnets. Spherical
tokamaks are inherently more compact and have a
higher efficiency, rather than building ever-larger
tokamak devices with huge costs and long timescales.’
Some institutions are instead seeking smaller scales
by revisiting the ‘stellarator’ reactor design invented in
1950 by Lyman Spitzer at Princeton – it fell out of favour
during the 1970s and 1980s because technology was
not yet sufficiently advanced to support the approach.
In December the Wendelstein 7-X, the largest-ever
stellarator, began plasma tests in Greifswald, Germany.
It is run by the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics
with support from Europe and the United States. The
reactor is largely torus-shaped with 70 superconducting
magnetic coils 3.5m high, to form a magnetic field.
Much like ITER, it is intended to show that a
commercial fusion power plant would be feasible,
by running for up to 30 minutes at a time.
‘A major problem in the early stellarators was that,
in contrast to tokamaks, particles might leave the
device even if they didn’t collide with other particles
– especially the most energetic particles which were
needed for it to become self-sustaining,’ says Professor
Dr Sibylle Günter, the Scientific Director at Max
Planck. ‘With the invention of supercomputers, it
became possible to optimise the magnetic field to
keep the particles inside the stellarators, as in the
30
Feature Nuclear fusion
Hot plasma in
the START
spherical
tokamak
at Culham
Laboratory
Wendelstein 7-X.’ Günter adds that stellarators have
the potential to provide an easier route to fusion than
tokamaks and to generate fewer large instabilities in
the plasma.
In addition to government-funded initiatives such
as Wendelstein 7-X and ITER, a wide variety of smaller
companies and start-ups are pursuing aspects of fusion
power. One such company, First Light Fusion, was spun
out of Oxford in 2011 by Professor Yiannis Ventikos
and Dr Nicholas Hawker, who completed his DPhil at
Lady Margaret Hall. It is reported to be studying the
production of energy when intense shockwaves crush
gas-filled cavities, an approach colloquially known
as ‘bubble fusion’, and to have last year completed
fundraising of up to £22.7m.
The largest fusion spin-off in the world is Tri Alpha
Energy in California, which was founded by plasma
physicists in 1998 and has reportedly raised more than
£64m from investors including Goldman Sachs,
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and astronaut Buzz
Aldrin. Similarly secretive, the company only recently
put up a website and started participating in
international conferences and workshops.
‘There are lots of people talking to venture capitalists
about ideas for fusion, but most are completely not
peer-reviewed,’ comments Cowley. ‘Tri Alpha is
probably the best of the start-ups at the moment, but
it’s a long way back from the federal programs. That is
not to say that there isn’t a bright idea out there which
could completely revolutionise fusion, but it’s very
difficult to do – which makes it really fascinating and
great fun for scientists.’
‘Fun’ and ‘marvel’ are themes which surface
repeatedly when talking to nuclear fusion researchers.
They often compare the quest for self-sustaining fusion
power to the space programme – in cost and difficulty,
at least – adding, however, that unlike the space
programme, fusion stands to have an even greater
impact on Earth.
‘It would be lovely to have fusion in my lifetime, to see
a real star burning on Earth,’ concludes Cowley.
Alexi Baker (Somerville, 2003) is a science writer and a historian
of science who completed her DPhil at Oxford in 2010.
@oxtoday
VOYAGES JULES VERNE
Feature French intellectuals
Tossed
not sunk
Helen Massy-Beresford asks why French
intellectual culture is in the doldrums
F
VOLTAIRE FOUNDATION
rom the founding father of rationalism,
Descartes, through Voltaire and Diderot
to Sartre and Derrida – it is impossible to
separate the history of modern philosophy
from the history of France. But in 2016, French
thought is in crisis.
‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’ (‘Tossed by the sea but not
sunk’) – the centuries-old motto of the city of Paris,
quoted after November’s terror attacks to convey
Below:
La Sainte Cène
du Patriarche
by Jean Huber
(c.1772). Voltaire
sits at the head
of a table with
his disciples
defiance in the face of adversity, could apply to the
world of French thought too, as it traverses a crisis
that goes far beyond recent events.
Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh, FBA, Tutorial Fellow in
Politics at Balliol and author of recently published How
the French Think (Allen Lane, 2015), says: ‘Up to the late
twentieth century there was an intelligibility about the
world – and France’s place in it made sense. That isn’t
there any more and that’s really rattled the French.’
French intellectuals Feature
French soldiers
under fire at the
Battle of Dien
Bien Phu in
Vietnam, 1954:
it was a defeat
that signalled
the end of
French colonial
influence in
Indochina.
American
participation in
the Vietnam war
was one result.
AKG-IMAGES/TT NEWS AGENCY
Below: students
riot in Paris on
1 May 1968
STR/AP/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
France in 2016 is mired in negativity, asking itself
questions about the future of its republican values and
its place in a fast-changing world. ‘[A] major sign of
this malaise is the loss of confidence by the French in
the creativity of their thinkers, and in their cultural
singularity. In 2012 Le Magazine Littéraire even dared to
raise the ultimate question: “Does France still think?”’
Before he looks more closely at the reasons for this
intellectual crisis, Hazareesingh sets out the structures,
figures and attitudes that combined to make France
the centre of the world of thought – even if the word
‘intellectual’ was only coined in the late nineteenth
century. Descartes’ 1637 Discourse on Method contains
the famous statement ‘Cogito ergo sum; I think therefore
I am.’ ‘This notion that thought was the defining
attribute of humankind was the cornerstone of
Descartes’ rationalism,’ writes Hazareesingh.
Later, the prominent Enlightenment figures
Voltaire, an early advocate of religious freedom and
freedom of expression and critic of the Catholic
Church; Geneva-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
author of The Social Contract, whose writings on the
negative effects of society on individuals were taken
up by revolutionaries; and Encyclopédie author Denis
Diderot helped to cement France’s place as the centre
of the intellectual world. Still later, the mid-twentiethcentury world witnessed the era of engagement,
when existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
De Beauvoir battled it out with Albert Camus over
the role of the state and the individual in society.
The way French society is structured, plus French
character traits, also helped to make France an
influential intellectual powerhouse.
Hazareesingh describes the French yearning
towards universality and love of general notions and
debating abstract theories, quoting the essayist Emile
de Montégut: ‘There is no people among whom
abstract ideas have played such a great role, whose
history is rife with such formidable philosophical
tendencies, and where individuals are so oblivious to
facts and possessed to such a high degree with a rage
for abstractions.’
So why, after centuries of dominance, is French
thought in the doldrums?
Hazareesingh argues that several major political and
social events in the twentieth century were triggers: the
struggle to come to terms with the events of the Vichy
regime, as well as the brutal end to France’s colonial
rule in Algeria and Indochina fuelled doubts about
France’s place in the world, helped by the increasing
global dominance of the English language. The debate
over national identity, secularity and integration of
France’s large Muslim population that has been
rumbling on for decades has been thrust into the
spotlight thanks to recent terror attacks and the rise
of the Front National. After years of economic woes
and in-fighting, the political left – traditionally
a source of outspoken French intellectuals – is in
disarray. Unemployment is at an 18-year high of 10.6%.
‘Despite promises to the contrary, unemployment in
France has risen by 700,000 since [President François]
Hollande was elected. There has been virtually no
economic growth during this period. Why would
anyone vote for the Socialists?’ asks Professor Jeremy
Jennings (St Antony’s, 1975), Head of Department and
Professor of Political Theory at King’s College London.
All these factors have contributed to a situation in
which France’s thinkers are looking inwards, trying to
make sense of the future of French society, rather
than outwards with philosophical concepts.
The landmark mass protests of 1968, the societal
upheaval that followed and the dawn of postmodernism were a turning point, Hazareesingh says.
‘On the one hand 1968 was a moment of great
liberation; it made the French more willing to
experiment with ideas. But I think over the longer
term, 1968 was also quite paradoxically self-defeating.’
That year and its aftermath also led to a focus
on the individual rather than broader society –
Hazareesingh describes it as ‘a privatisation of life’.
Georges Pilard, a research editor at Oxford’s
Voltaire Foundation, adds: ‘The last properly
influential wave of French intellectualism was “French
theory”, expounded by the likes of Gilles Deleuze and
Michel Foucault, whose work explored the way in
which modern societies control their citizens; and
Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist who explored
the relationship between text and meaning.’
Their influence lives on, although most notably in
France’s long-standing ally, the United States, where
@oxtoday
33
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ABTA No.Y6050
‘French Theory’ was enthusiastically adopted in
the 1970s and 1980s, revolutionising the way many
academic departments studied humanities subjects
and literature in particular.
‘Postmodernism was largely for external
consumption. It had far more impact in the United
States than it did in France,’ says Jennings.
Pilard adds: ‘Gender theory owes a lot to people like
Foucault, for instance. Nowadays the prevalent feeling
is that postmodernism was good at deconstructing,
but not so good at providing anything useful to
replace what it had taken apart. [Philosopher] Michel
Onfray’s last series of lectures focused very much on
the nihilistic qualities and abstruseness of much of
French thought from the 1960s through to the 1980s.
There is currently an appetite in France for something
more concrete and empirical than what was on offer
during those years.’
Hazareesingh believes that the aftermath of
postmodernism partly explains the current crisis in
French thought: ‘[Postmodernists] scorched the earth
so well in France that they’ve barely left any trace.
Foucault is still widely cited in the humanities and
social sciences in the English-speaking world but no
one talks about him in France, even when people are
talking about power and surveillance. With the state of
emergency, this is a perfect moment to talk about how
Foucault described the state as the agent of surveillance
in society, but I haven’t seen anyone do that.’
More than 30 years after Foucault’s death, there’s
no doubt that France is living through negative times,
as a flurry of books charting France’s decline – from
La France Qui Tombe (France in Free Fall, Perrin, 2003)
by Nicolas Baverez to Éric Zemmour’s best-selling
Le Suicide Français (Albin Michel, 2014) – shows. The field
of study of this negativity even has a name: le déclinisme.
‘The French win all the prizes for being the most
pessimistic about the future. We should all avoid
having a romanticised picture of France,’ says
Jennings, asking, ‘is the “French model” sustainable?
Probably not.’
A debate over national identity and how France can
square the integration of its large Muslim population
with its founding principle of laïcité (secularity),
brought sharply into focus in recent months, is
preoccupying the intellectual world in France – and
leaving little room for the outward-looking, universallyambitioned thought the country is famous for.
‘Obviously national identity is an important issue but
the French don’t really seem to be able to see beyond
it,’ says Jennings.
Professor Cynthia Fleury, professor at the American
University of Paris, member of the National Ethics
Committee and holder of the first chair in philosophy
at l’Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, says: ‘When it comes to
national identity, France isn’t asking itself questions. It’s
more that it’s divided between those who’ve turned in
on themselves, who see in globalisation, immigration,
multiculturalism and European governance something
to be worried about with the result that they vote for
the Front National, and the rest, who don’t reject all
that but who don’t yet know how to define the positive
characteristics of what they see emerging. The feeling
of “crisis” remains. As Marxist theoretician Antonio
Gramsci put it: “An old world is dying and the new one
is taking a long time to appear.”’
ERICA SIMONE/SHUTTERSTOCK
French intellectuals Feature
A march in
protest at the
Charlie Hebdo
assassinations
in January 2015
Gramsci went on to say that ‘monsters’ inhabited the
chiaroscuro that lay between the two worlds.
Academics believe that France resolving the debate
over national identity will be virtually impossible in the
short-term, but that making progress is a key part of
getting out of the negative spiral.
‘Broadly speaking, I see the last ten years as a period
when the French closed increasingly into themselves,’
Hazareesingh says. ‘Nobody is now daring to make the
case for something different because of where public
opinion is – even intellectuals. In the old days you had
intellectuals who were very happy to go against the
grain.’ These have traditionally come from the left, he
adds. ‘But we haven’t had these figures who stand up
and say this is not right, because the left are in crisis.’
So how will French thought look in the future?
France’s time as the birthplace of new schools of
thought is likely over, says
Pilard. ‘I can’t see any new
“-isms” round the corner, as
once was the case in the
second half of the twentieth
century, with existentialism,
structuralism and
postmodernism. There are,
and will be, French thinkers
but whether they’ll collectively
form something that could be conceived of as
“French thought” is another matter.’
But Fleury adds: ‘There is a very active new
generation of thinkers, whether in economics,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, conservation biology,
cognitive science or communication science, which
unfortunately has too small a presence abroad for
a very simple reason: they publish too much in
French-speaking journals and their works are not yet
translated enough. French intellectuals are not absent
or irrelevant but they are suffering from a lack of
translation, especially from French to English.’
‘There are around 50 influential intellectuals in
France, in general part of the university system,’
adds Fleury, citing research institutes the Collège
de France, the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the
Ecole Polytechnique.
Pilard adds: ‘People like Alain Finkielkraut, Michel
Onfray, Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd and even
‘I see the last ten years
as a period when the
French closed
increasingly into
themselves’
@oxtoday
35
controversial journalist Éric Zemmour are all
influential because they get a lot of media exposure,
though few will have been heard of outside France.
And one of the most clear-eyed observers of France
over the past 20 years is [novelist] Michel Houellebecq.’
France’s dominance in maths and economics also
points to a new form of French thought that is
influential beyond its borders. Pilard cites economist
Thomas Piketty, the author of Capital in the Twenty-First
Century (2014), as one of the most influential French
thinkers internationally, while Jean Tirole won the
Nobel Prize for Economics in 2014. French names,
including Cédric Villani (dubbed the Lady Gaga of
mathematics for his charismatic style and ability to
communicate to the masses) dominate the winners of
the Fields Medal for mathematics in recent decades.
Fleury also believes that, far from being finished
as many believed after the death of Sartre, the
notion of engagement has transformed itself in the
twenty-first century. ‘There are new kinds of civic
engagement linked to volunteering, which are more
entrepreneurial rather than strictly speaking militant
or political,’ says the author of Les Irremplaçables (2015),
which discusses the individual and its role in society.
‘Changing the world, creating a sharing society remain
a major concern for new generations but they find the
indoctrination and complacency of political structures
intolerable. They prefer to work through social
networks and internationally. Modern engagement or
citizenship should be the result of individuation: a
process of creating a subject. It’s no longer about
setting up singularity and collectivity as opposites.
People want to use what is most individual about them
to participate in creating something collective.’
Pilard agrees. ‘Engagement is not as prevalent as it
used to be when Sartre was still alive, but BernardHenri Lévy was a passionate advocate of military
intervention against Gaddafi’s forces in Libya in 2011,
and he called for military action against Bashar
al-Assad in Syria in 2013. And André Glucksmann,
a philosopher who died recently, had been a very vocal
supporter of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. One could
argue that all of the above were misguided attempts
at engagement, but they do fall into that category
nonetheless. At a more grassroots level, Michel Onfray
created the Université populaire de Caen in the early
2000s.’ The establishment of this free university aimed
at democratising learning and knowledge ‘can be seen
as another form of engagement, this time for the
dissemination of knowledge,’ Pilard says.
Hazareesingh too sounds a note of optimism about
engagement: ‘I think it can come back. Libération [the
left-leaning newspaper] recently did a long series of
interviews starting with the same premise – “Where is
the new inventive, engaging French thought?” They
went not to the summit but looked at the mid-level,
younger folk who are writing and saying interesting
and quite provocative things: the next generation.
There will be rising stars emerging because of the way
the French system is set up. As long as there are elite
universities the supply will continue to arrive. In the
long term I’m not at all pessimistic.’
Helen Massy-Beresford (Hertford, 1998) is currently a freelance journalist, London-based after four years as a
Reuters correspondent in Paris.
36
Feature French intellectuals
Right: Catriona
Seth, one of the
forces behind
Tolerance: The
Beacon of the
Enlightenment
Avenging Charlie Hebdo
with tolerance
One consequence of the Charlie Hebdo
assassinations in January 2015 has been an
upsurge in interest in the French Enlightenment,
which has spread to Oxford.
Jesus College’s Fellow and Tutor in French,
Dr Caroline Warman, has presided over
a remarkable mass collaboration of Oxford
undergraduates and faculty. Led by Warman
and guided by at least a dozen enthusiastic
college tutors, 102 students from 15 colleges
have translated dozens of snippets from the
French eighteenth century, published by
Open Book Classics as Tolerance: The Beacon of
the Enlightenment. Many of the passages have
never before been translated into English, and
many of the writers will not be familiar.
The project began in France as an
impassioned response to the Charlie Hebdo attack,
and was initially the brainchild of the French
Society for the Study of the 18th Century,
whose then President, Professor Catriona Seth
(pictured above)(Magdalen, 1982), has
recently come to All Souls from the University
of Lorraine.
Seth recalls that the French volume, which
was assembled and published in mere weeks,
was intentionally sold in French newsagents,
thus avoiding the fate of most academic books.
Soon after, with Seth’s help and the support
of many others from Oxford and elsewhere, the
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
decided to translate the French volume into
English. That was when Warman ‘crowdsourced’
Oxford undergraduate talent to help with
the translations.
Recently published in the UK in multiple
formats including a free, downloadable PDF,
Tolerance received more than 10,000 downloads
in its first week.
@oxtoday
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Feature Cecil and WildCRU
COVER: ANDY LOVERIDGE
David Macdonald tells Georgina Ferry
that some good might come from
the illegal shooting of Cecil the lion
The lion, the web
and the
WildCRU
O
JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE /YOUTUBE
n 28 July 2015 the American comedian
fitted with a GPS collar in 2009. ‘Most of the lions that
and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel took
die in our study area are shot by trophy hunters,’ says
four minutes of his live broadcast to give
Macdonald. ‘A proportion of those are shot illegally.
his reaction to the recent killing of Cecil
It’s never gone viral before.’ He has led a study of the
the lion by Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. ‘I think
‘Cecil moment’, commissioning press analysts, in order
it’s important to have some good come out of this
to understand more about the role of social media in
disgusting tragedy,’ he concluded, ‘so this is the
people’s engagement with wildlife conservation.
website for the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at
WildCRU is a research group within the Department
Oxford… If you want to make this into a positive you
of Zoology: like all research groups, it lives hand to
can make a donation to support them at the very least.’
mouth on time-limited grants and philanthropic
The story, which had been circulating in the press and
donations. In what some have called a ‘silver lining’,
on social media for the previous
the $1.1m in donations prompted
week, went viral. Celebrities from
by Cecil’s death will guarantee
that WildCRU’s work on the
Andy Murray to Cara Delevingne
lions of Zimbabwe and Botswana
weighed in on Twitter, deploring
can continue for at least the
the killing; 4.4m visitors attempted
next two years.
to access the WildCRU site, which
This story is much more
temporarily crashed under the
complicated than ‘hunters bad,
onslaught. No other story has ever
conservationists good’. It was the
kept the Oxford University press
hunting fraternity that first
office so busy. For nearly a week
After US Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast,
entreated
Macdonald and his
the WildCRU Director, Professor
the story went viral. Right: David
colleague Dr Andy Loveridge to set
David Macdonald, did nothing
Macdonald and Andy Loveridge attach
up a study on the lions of Hwange
but give interviews by Skype and
a radio collar to a lioness
National Park in Zimbabwe. They
phone or to visiting TV crews,
were worried about declining numbers – and indeed
eating sandwiches on air as one interview segued to
the latest estimates (led by WildCRU) suggest that
the next. The social media onslaught he found
there are only 20,000 to 30,000 wild lions left in the
‘unsettling and frightening’ – among all the messages
world, a tenth of their numbers a century ago.
of support, he received hate mail because he said in a
‘Hunting can be sustainable only if it is closely
broadcast that Palmer had suffered enough vilification
regulated,’ says Macdonald. ‘In the 1990s hunters were
and should be left in peace or at least left to the law.
allowed a quota of 60 male lions per year in the area
When I meet him five months later at the Recanatioutside the park. Our research showed there were only
Kaplan Centre at Tubney House, Macdonald still
25 males in the park altogether: that level of offtake
seems bemused by it all. He and his colleagues have
could not be sustained.’
been studying lions in Zimbabwe and neighbouring
The WildCRU studies showed that hunting outside
countries since 1999. Cecil, aged 13, with his distinctive
the park had a ‘perturbation effect’ – it created
black mane, was one of the study animals: he had been
38
DAVID MACDONALD
39
Feature Cecil and WildCRU
40
area to plant maize: on plots fertilised in this way crop
yields increased by 30%. This is significant in a region
where people regularly face starvation. ‘Modern
conservation is about the well-being of people as well
as lions,’ says Macdonald. ‘If lions have no economic
value, people will stop tolerating them.’
Which brings us to trophy hunting, also known by its
proponents as ‘consumptive tourism’, the practice by
which customers pay $50,000 to $100,000 to shoot big
cats, rhino, elephants and other iconic but endangered
species. The big-game hunting organisations argue that
their activities actually save wildlife, because game
reserves are protected from development. Macdonald
acknowledges that there is some truth in their claim.
‘Phototourism is one way for wildlife to pay its way,’ he
says, ‘but much larger areas of land
are dedicated to wildlife because of
hunting. Much of this land is too
remote and inhospitable to be
attractive to tourists.’ Game reserves
may be patrolled by rangers to deter
poaching: poachers use snares
and poison, as well as weapons,
causing immense suffering.
Another of WildCRU’s projects is
to train and equip anti-poaching
patrols around Hwange.
In the wake of the Cecil furore,
several North American airlines
announced that they would not
carry ‘trophies’, or body parts,
taken from the ‘big five’ African species including
lions. In December the US Fish and Wildlife Service
enhanced the conservation status of two lion
subspecies and banned the import of trophies from
countries that are not deemed to have ‘established
conservation programmes and well-managed lion
populations’. And in January 2016 the state legislature
of New Jersey passed a ‘Cecil the lion’ bill banning the
import of trophies through La Guardia, JFK and
Newark airports. The hunters argue that such
disincentives to hunting could be bad news for up to
half of the lion population. An official statement
released jointly by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife
Management Authority and the country’s tourism
industry in August 2015 reasserted that ‘regulated and
well-managed, responsible and ethical hunting can
provide multiple benefits in Zimbabwe to local
communities and the national economy’.
‘Science could do a better job of looking at the
economics of hunting versus phototourism,’ says
Macdonald. ‘We have a graduate student doing that.’
Conservationists and hunters all agree that to be
sustainable, hunting needs to be strictly regulated
through a system of policed quotas and licences.
The sad story of Cecil began when Walter Palmer
paid a local guide, Theo Bronkhorst, to take him
hunting near Hwange in July 2015. Driving through
the bush at night, the hunters encountered Cecil, who
had wandered out of the park. Palmer shot him with
a crossbow, wounding but not killing him: the pair
then tracked the injured lion for 12 hours before
finishing him off, skinning him and taking his head.
At that point they discovered that he was wearing a
GPS collar, which soon after stopped working. The
GLEN STUBBE/TNS VIA ZUMA WIRE
territorial vacuums that encouraged more lions to
leave the park and risk getting shot, while orphaned
cubs were often killed by other males moving in on
undefended prides. If hunting continued at this level
unchecked, lions in western Zimbabwe would soon
face catastrophic decline. ‘Our evidence stimulated
the government authorities to introduce a moratorium
on all lion hunting in that part of the country that
lasted from 2004 to 2008,’ says Macdonald, ‘after
which they set a new quota of four to five individuals
per year. Andy Loveridge and I are very proud of that.’
Fundamental to WildCRU’s research is being able to
track the lions. In the early days they were fitted with
radio collars: today, 20 to 25 lions at a time wear GPS
collars so that their movements can be tracked by
satellite. In total the team has
accumulated a sample of 200
lions in what is known as the
KAZA landscape (the Kavango
Zambezi Transfrontier
Conservation Area, which
straddles the borders of
Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola,
Namibia and Zambia). ‘Lions
need habitat in which they can
disperse,’ says Macdonald.
‘Loss of habitat leads to small
populations, which are much
more vulnerable. The KAZA
landscape is the largest
functioning ecosystem for lions
in Africa. We are exploring whether pockets of
lion habitat can be linked by dispersal corridors: we’re
studying what routes exist in the lion’s mind so that we
can get those routes protected.’ Already they know that
some lions will travel over a 200km radius, covering as
much as 4,000km in a year.
The biggest threat to lions is not trophy hunting, but
poor people trying to make a living. All round the edges
of Hwange Park – which is not fenced – are farming
communities, which keep cattle and goats as well as
growing maize and other crops. Farming destroys lion
habitat, and people come into conflict with lions when
they kill their cattle and, occasionally, their children.
Sometimes villagers kill lions in retaliation; lions may
also get caught in snares set for other species.
WildCRU has set up a programme, the Long Shield
Lion Guardians, to mitigate this. ‘We recruit young
people from local villages and train them to prevent
lion predation,’ says Macdonald. ‘We give them a
mountain bike, a phone, a GPS tracker and a vuvuzela
[the ear-splitting plastic trumpet known from South
African football matches].’ When the research team
monitoring the lions learns from the satellite that one
is crossing the park border, they call the nearest ‘Long
Shield’, who, guided by their GPS, cycle to the area,
warn the farmers to move or shut up their animals,
and gathers a party to frighten the lion back into the
park by lighting fires and blowing horns. The project
has halved predation of livestock, and WildCRU is now
introducing the same scheme in Botswana.
Another part of the project encourages coalitions of
families to share ‘bomas’ or secure mobile enclosures
where they can corral their animals at night. They
move the bomas periodically, leaving a well-manured
Left: Protestors
gather outside
Walter Palmer’s
dental practice
in Bloomington,
Minnesota,
July 2015
Right: Long Shield
Lion Guardians
alert local farmers
to lions in their
area; equipped
with mountain
bikes, phones,
GPS trackers and
vuvuzelas
Far right:
Lioness with cubs.
Many lions are
studied from
cubhood, thus
providing whole
life history data
@oxtoday
authorities allege that Bronkhorst did not have the
necessary licence, nor did the landowner have a quota
for killing lions.
However, they say that Palmer’s paperwork was
in order and therefore he has no case to answer.
Bronkhorst and the landowner have been charged with
organising an illegal hunt, but at the time of writing
their case had yet to come to court. ‘This hunt was
reprehensible,’ says Macdonald, who described Cecil’s
death at the time as ‘heartbreaking’. Under other
circumstances – if Bronkhorst and the landowner had
got the permits – it would’ve been perfectly legal.
Macdonald and Loveridge feared that Cecil’s death
could put his pride under threat and lead to more
deaths. ‘Lions live in male coalitions, which dominate
a pride of females,’ says Macdonald. ‘We thought that
Cecil’s coalition partner Jericho wouldn’t be able to
hold the pride on his own – that he would be ousted,
and Cecil’s cubs killed.’ But at the beginning of 2016
the news from Hwange, together with photos from
WildCRU field researcher Brent Stapelkamp, is much
more positive. Not only were Cecil’s six cubs alive, but
Jericho had fathered two more with a lioness that
Stapelkamp saved from a snare two years ago.
The team provides updates on Cecil’s family on the
WildCRU website. His death was a tragedy, but it has
attracted new supporters. Thanks to their donations,
Macdonald and his colleagues will be able to track
more lions, buy more research equipment, and bring
more Zimbabweans to Oxford for training. WildCRU
offers a postgraduate diploma in International Wildlife
Conservation Practice, with funding from the
Recanati-Kaplan Foundation and the big cat charity
Panthera (the students are known as the ‘WildCRU
@oxtoday
DAVID MACDONALD
DAVID MACDONALD
Cecil and WildCRU Feature
Panthers’). The money is important – WildCRU’s lion
project had been facing a crippling deficit in 2016 –
but for Macdonald the media outcry means more.
‘All of these people might have been expressing their
concern and outrage for one lion,’ he says. ‘They might
have been expressing their disdain for a particular sort
of wealthy, white, North American male. But they might
have been saying they cared about lions, they cared
about wildlife.’ His goal now is to work out how to
harness that crescendo of feeling. ‘Can the Cecil
moment be turned into a Cecil movement?’ he asks.
‘Can it be a turning point that affects the relationship
between people and wildlife in the twenty-first century?’
To that end, WildCRU is entering into a relationship
with 10,000 of its new donors, sending them updates
and video messages. ‘It’s still a long road ahead,’ he
says. ‘But the enthusiasm and interest that’s been
inspired by the not-unusual death of this one lion
could be transformative. I feel a huge debt of gratitude
to those millions who showed concern, who previously
had no connection with wildlife conservation.’
In May 2015, while Cecil was still happily guarding
his pride in Hwange National Park, David Macdonald
came in at No. 3 in the first-ever BBC Wildlife Power
List, ahead of David Attenborough. WildCRU’s work
embraces not just lions, but other endangered
carnivores such as the Ethiopian wolf, and the
relationship between farming and wildlife in the UK.
With the added impetus of the ‘Cecil movement’,
Macdonald and the WildCRU team have the chance
to be even more influential in the years ahead.
Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster,
and former editor of Oxford Today.
41
Feature Scholars at risk
Doing our bit?
D
r Leila Alieva is gazing out of the window of
the coffee area at St Antony’s College onto
a peaceful Oxford scene of Victorian
houses and winter gardens on a rainy
afternoon. ‘This is a wonderful place,’ she says. But her
thoughts are thousands of miles away, with her family,
friends and colleagues in Azerbaijan.
After a government crackdown in 2014, academics,
journalists and NGO activists there started to be
arrested. Alieva, a specialist in political science and
international relations who ran an independent think
tank in Baku, saw ‘one after the other’ her colleagues
being given prison sentences of up to eight years; their
health, she says, has been destroyed in prison.
Alieva had to flee her country in a hurry, and within
two months she found herself at Oxford. Friends had
told her about Cara (cara1933.org), the Council for
At-Risk Academics, a remarkable British charity which,
since its foundation in 1933, has been a lifeline for
scholars in countries where their freedom is
threatened. Cara, which has long had a relationship
with Oxford, paid for Alieva’s flights and, together
with St Antony’s and another sponsor, arranged for
a fully funded two-year research position at St Antony’s
as an academic visitor.
Cara itself was established (as the Academic
Assistance Council, later the Society for the Protection
of Science and Learning) by the coming together of
many of the leading academics of the day, including
a number of heads of Oxford colleges, many of
whom would have had in recent memory Oxford’s
welcome of numerous Belgian refugees during the
First World War.
Archives held in the Bodleian Library show that
in the 1930s, several meetings were held in Oxford
to appeal for funds for academic refugees. Then, as
now, finding support was politically complicated.
On Saturday 13 November 1937, an international
meeting was convened by Sir William Beveridge at his
Master’s Lodgings at University College. The minutes
show that Beveridge ‘hoped that the contrast between
the beauty of Oxford and the ugliness of the fate of
displaced scholars would inspire all to continued
efforts on behalf of their unfortunate colleagues.’
Beveridge’s ambition found recent echo in the
Principal of Hertford College, the economist Will
Hutton, a campaigner for more action within the
collegiate University. Having drawn a stark contrast
42
How are academics suffering persecution
in their home countries being helped by
Oxford, asks Olivia Gordon
between German generosity and British stinginess on
the whole question of human dignity and helping
immigrants, Hutton ended one of his popular Guardian
columns last summer: ‘Britain, within limits, needs to
be as open as possible, with a Europe similarly open,
and it needs to share the costs. The alternative is too
dark to contemplate.’ For ‘Britain’ you could substitute
‘Oxford’ or ‘international scholarly community’.
The short-term result – not forgetting the University’s
own Refugee Studies Centre, the first of its kind when
founded in 1982, and since then a staunch advocate of
migrant interests – is that Oxford’s collaboration with
Cara has been beefed up, notes Cara Director Stephen
Wordsworth, CMG, LVO. He has been working with
Ruth Kinahan, from the University’s Human Resources
Department, to establish a central point of contact and
process for at-risk scholars who might be considered by
Oxford, dependent partly on other criteria such as
academic achievement and fit. Wordsworth says, ‘The
heads of various colleges have come together and
discussed what they’ll be able to do amongst themselves
and with the University authorities.’
Kinahan adds: ‘There’s a strong feeling in the
University that we should be doing more to help people.
One thing I’m doing is coordinating the colleges’
responses, compiling a list of what they can offer.’
Since October 2014, Oxford has welcomed four
Cara scholars. Apart from Alieva, there are three
Syrian academics; two men and a woman, their names
protected. They represent a range of disciplines, with
two scientists and one specialist in the humanities.
Each is hosted by a college, and supported both
academically and practically. All are settling in well,
Kinahan reports – ‘Being here is making a real
difference to them.’ Oxford is already considering
a new batch of Cara applicants. At present, enquiries
via Cara are ‘overwhelmingly from Syria’, Wordsworth
says, but the hope is that academics will come to
Oxford in future from other countries like Zimbabwe.
‘Given Oxford’s high standards, we’re not going to see
hundreds coming, but I hope we will have tens in the
not-too-distant future,’ he adds.
‘Every day here is a present,’ Alieva says, a year into
her stay. ‘It’s such great luck compared to what my
colleagues have gone through.’
It is not always straightforward. Other international
academics from the US or Europe have told Alieva
they sometimes feel lonely or isolated at Oxford, ➺
Cara scholar
Leila Alieva
at St Antony’s
College
@oxtoday
39
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Scholars at risk Feature
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/ROB JUDGES
Thaís Roque
(right) and fellow
supporters of
the Oxford
Students
Refugee
Campaign
a point reiterated by alumna Sushila Dhall [St Hilda’s,
1986] who works as a psychotherapist for refugees
and asylum seekers at the Oxford charity Refugee
Resource, which was launched in 1999 by Amanda
Webb Johnson, formerly of the University’s Refugee
Studies Centre.
Dhall’s clients typically have no relationship to the
University, but find themselves living in the city. But
they illustrate a broadly inconvenient truth, that it is
very difficult to find your feet quickly and thrive in
a foreign country, especially if trauma resides in recent
memory. ‘Refugees are largely an invisible group in
Oxford [the City]. And that’s also true in Oxford
University,’ says Dhall. Over the past 12 years Refugee
Resource has worked with four Oxford University
students – two undergraduates, one master’s student
and one doctoral student. No two stories are the same,
but to give an example of one, ‘K’, her family had fled
to Britain from Bosnia when she was a child. K had
witnessed massacres, children being killed in front of
their parents and her older brother being dragged
away and shot. At 17, suffering depression and
post-traumatic stress disorder, she sought help from
Refugee Resource. With specialist counselling from
the charity, K found equilibrium, and went on to apply
successfully to read Physics at the University.
Dhall says: ‘Our experience is that a lot of good
comes from it [displaced students studying at Oxford],
but it’s a hard experience. People have felt alienated,
isolated; their work is appreciated but their whole
self is not somehow part of the picture. If someone
is a refugee, they have often been highly traumatised,
but at Oxford, you’re expected to do the work.’
New inspiration has come recently, as it so often
does, from existing students, in this case international
students at Oxford. Launched last October, a new
campaign for Oxford scholarships for students-at-risk
is being spearheaded by biomedical engineering DPhil
@oxtoday
candidate Thaís Roque (Magdalen, 2013). Roque,
from Brazil, has an Oxford-Bellhouse graduate
scholarship, without which she wouldn’t be here, and
which, she says, has made her appreciate how lifechanging a scholarship can be. She got the idea for
the Oxford Students Refugee Campaign when she
‘noticed how everyone shares pictures [of refugees] and
feels bad but doesn’t take any action. I had this feeling
we had to do something and from my point of view
the University was failing to address the current crisis,
but we do have a history of helping at-risk academics.
There’s nothing sadder than a talent that’s been wasted.’
Encouraged by fellows including Emeritus Fellow
Bernard Sufrin of Worcester, Professor Sally Mapstone,
the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, and
Helena Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy, QC, Principal of
Mansfield College, Roque launched her campaign
last October. Her aim is to get every Oxford student
to contribute £1 a month for the next two years to fund
a merit-based scholarship fund for at-risk students,
which she hopes will raise £260,000 a year. This will
be divided between students who will get £30,000 each
to cover the cost of their Oxford education and their
living expenses. Roque hopes that the University’s
development office will match this with external
donations from alumni and friends, to make the fund
sustainable. At the moment the University is working
with Roque to set up the fund.
Roque’s campaign has snowballed, with 15 professors
and fellows contacting her in the first week to offer
support, 700 freshers signing up at the freshers’ fair,
the student union coming on board and individual
colleges now pledging their help one after the other.
The University administration is working with the
campaign to iron out the process behind the pledge.
‘The only way we can fight ISIS is with education,’
Roque believes. ‘Oxford has a great network and
infrastructure which can contribute and help train
45
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medics and engineers to reconstruct their own societies
when they return home.’
One of the issues is the application process from
within a warzone. Manar Marzouk (Brasenose, 2015)
is a Syrian master’s student who was offered a place at
Oxford. She told the University she couldn’t afford to
come, and was interviewed for the Eve Jones
Scholarship. ‘I was in Damascus with mortars landing
in front of me; my house was twice hit by a mortar. The
day [the scholarship] interviewed me on Skype I was
distressed, with bombs all around me. I saw these four
lovely ladies and they made me feel a certain peace.’
With a goal of working in the humanitarian field,
Marzouk is studying International Health and Tropical
Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine.
Like Alieva, Marzouk feels both extraordinarily
fortunate to be at Oxford, yet remains full of sadness
for what she has left behind. She wanted to stay in
Syria, but says: ‘I reached a point where I couldn’t do
more without risking my life. We used to have a good
academic system in Syria but [now] if you want to
openly explore ideas it’s difficult.’ She was daunted at
the prospect of Oxford, but has found it humane.
‘Oxford is not about the name – when you get inside,
you realise there are normal people, very humble, just
nice people.’ She has made friends and describes her
master’s programme with 18 people from 14 countries
as ‘like a family – it’s an amazing opportunity. I feel the
space to say whatever I want and I find support.’
‘Higher education is one international network these
days,’ says Wordsworth, ‘and all universities benefit
from overseas students and faculty.’ The positive
impact of welcoming at-risk scholars is significant not
only to the rescued, but to the University and wider
world. As Marzouk puts it, ‘As much as the University
is enriching us, we can enrich it.’
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/ROB JUDGES
Doing our bit Feature
But getting this message across in the face of the Daily
Mail and the media obsession with UKIP is difficult. Dr
Liz Peretz, an Associate Fellow of the Department of
Social Policy and Intervention, recently spoke of how in
Oxford in 1914, the University welcomed, housed and
gave research facilities to around 20 Belgian academics
with their families, as well as Belgian students. Letters
poured in with offers of hospitality, Merton and New
College offered housing while St John’s gave a hall and
teacher to the children. Today, Peretz believes, ‘People
want to help but feel helpless, powerless; it’s going
against the grain of the media and statutory bodies
– so helpers feel they’re struggling upstream.’
Current initiatives raise a lot of goodwill and hope,
but only time will tell if the University can live up to its
historical record of generosity in this area of need.
Sushila Dhall,
who works as a
psychotherapist
at Refugee
Resource
Olivia Gordon (Cambridge, 1997) is an Oxford-based
freelance journalist writing for national newspapers
Notable émigré students and scholars at Oxford
Albert Einstein, physicist. Briefly at Oxford on
three occasions between May 1931 and June 1933,
en route to permanent citizenship in the US.
Later asked for his salary to go towards other
Jewish émigrés from Germany.
Professor Sir Ludwig Guttmann, neurologist.
Left Germany to Balliol in 1939. After saving lives
during Kristallnacht, fled the Nazis with his family
and went on to found the Paralympic Games.
Guttmann and his family lodged in the home
of Lord Lindsay, AAC councillor and Master
of Balliol College.
Albert Einstein
receiving his
certificate of
American
citizenship
NOBEL FOUNDATION
Sir Ernst Chain, biochemist. Was born in Germany
and fled before the Second World War because he
was Jewish. Was the co-recipient of the 1945 Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine because of his
groundbreaking work on penicillin.
US LIBRARY OF CONGRES
Sir Isaiah Berlin (Corpus, 1928), philosopher
and historian of ideas. Fled Bolshevik rule and
Latvian anti-Semitism in 1920, founding President,
Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1975.
Erwin
Schrödinger
became an Irish
citizen in 1948
@oxtoday
Paul Jacobsthal, archaeologist. Appointed
a lecturer in Christ Church in 1937, having
fled Nazi Germany with help from Oxford
archaeologist Sir John Beazley.
Leszek Kołakowski, philosopher and historian
of ideas. Senior research fellow at All Souls from
1970, having been dismissed from his post in
Poland in 1968 on account of his successful
debunking of Marxism.
Aung San Suu Kyi (St Hugh’s, 1964), politician,
leader of Burma’s National League for Democracy.
She said: ‘Throughout the years when I was
struggling for human rights in Burma, I felt
I was doing something of which my old university
would have approved.’
Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel prize-winning Austrian
physicist who made great strides in quantum
theory, including the famous SchrÖdinger
equation. Fled Berlin to Magdalen in 1934.
Opposed Nazism and went on to secure funding
and opportunities for Jewish scientists.
47
Tours for the Intelligent Traveller
Travel • Understand • Enjoy
www.jonbainestours.co.uk
East of Java
North East Turkey and Georgia
3 - 17 June 2016
9 - 22 June 2016
Step off the tourist trail and experience
lesser-travelled Indonesia. Travel through
eastern Java to Bali, Flores and onto the
Komodo archipelago.
Explore the history and cultural riches of
spectacular northeast Turkey and Georgia
with travel writer Jeremy Seal.
5 - 16 September 2016
Burma – The Road to Mandalay
The History of Medicine in Italy
17 - 30 September 2016
14 - 27 October 2016
Rajasthan and the Pushkar
Camel Fair
Our ever-popular tour to Burma visits
Rangoon, Mandalay, Bagan and Lake Inle
by road and river cruise.
Explore the history of medicine in Italy
with Bill and Helen Bynum. The tour
travels from Naples to Rome, Florence,
Bologna, Padua and Venice.
6 - 19 November 2016
Ethiopia – Historical and
Contemporary
Calcutta and Hooghly Cruise
Persia – Historical and
Contemporary
12 - 26 February 2017
Combine three days in historic Calcutta
with a relaxing seven-night cruise up the
Hooghly River with Dr John Richardson.
Ethiopia’s dramatic scenery and ancient
heritage is still relatively unexplored.
Ethiopia expert, Dr Richard Marsh, will
give specialist talks providing context to
the tour.
13 - 24 March 2017
To book or enquire about these and other tours, contact us:
Jon Baines Tours, 1A Salcott Road, London, SW11 6DQ
Tel: +44 (0) 207 223 9485 / 5618
Email: info@jonbainestours.co.uk
www.jonbainestours.co.uk
History of Medicine Cruise in
Greece and its islands
Take a journey that encompasses thousands of
years of medical history through the Eastern
Mediterranean with Dr Simon Chaplin.
Travel through Rajasthan, staying in palaces
and luxury tents and visiting the unique
and historic Pushkar Camel Fair.
May 2017 (dates TBA)
Enjoy exquisite teahouses and gardens,
spectacular architecture and archaeology,
and gain insight into Iran’s history and
modern society.
Book essays and reviews Common room
Common room
Book essays and reviews
Queen of Spies
Daphne Park, Britain’s Cold War Spy Master
by Paddy Hayes
D
aphne Park – Baroness Park of
Monmouth – served during the Second
World War with SOE and afterwards
with MI6 before becoming Principal of
Somerville College. She spent her early
childhood in what was then Southern Tanganyika,
five hundred miles south-west of Dar-es-Salaam
(not north, as stated in the blurb). She was educated
via a correspondence course run by the Anglican
church until, in 1932, aged 11, she was sent to school
in London, living with two great aunts. Her father
and brother died and she did not see her mother
again until after the Second World War.
She won two scholarships to Oxford and in 1939 went
up to Somerville to read French. She became secretary
and president of the OU Liberal Club and was only the
second woman to address the Union – ‘primarily due
to the wartime shortage of men’, she later said. In
1943 she contrived to get into the Special Operations
Executive, charged with sabotage in occupied Europe.
After the war she tried to join MI6. She was rejected, but
refused to take no for an answer (a theme of her life)
and was later accepted. Across 30 years she served in
Moscow, the Congo, Hanoi and Zambia, becoming the
most senior woman in MI6 and first female controller.
On leaving she became Principal of Somerville from
1980 to 1989. Thus nearly a quarter of her working life
was spent in Oxford, although that period occupies
only five pages of this 328-page account. The greater
part is an attempt to describe her career in MI6.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to write about people
in the intelligence agencies without recourse to gossip,
faulty or partial recollection, received opinion or
speculation. That said, Paddy Hayes probably does as
good a job as can be done by drawing on the National
Archives, on Daphne’s public pronouncements
(exceptionally, she was licensed by MI6 to talk about
aspects of her career), on the recollections of friends
and a few named colleagues and on the opinions of
unnamed former MI6 officers. The result is a book that
tells you more about life in rat-infested Hanoi or Cold
War Moscow or the Belgian Congo than what Daphne
did in those places, which is largely speculation.
However, the many anecdotes – verifiable or not
– create an accurate impression of personality which
Queen of Spies:
Daphne Park,
Britain’s Cold War
Spy Master
By Paddy Hayes,
Duckworth
Overlook, £20
ONLINE
Read other
reviews:
oxfordtoday.
ox.ac.uk
@oxtoday
Hayes does well to convey. The description of her
disgrace and demotion in SOE for complaining about
her incompetent superior, a man called Spooner, is
typical: she was paraded in front of all the instructing
staff, where he treated her to a diatribe of abuse.
During the torrent of invective Park, who had been
standing, decided to sit down. When roared at by the
RSM to stand to attention, she refused on the grounds
that the manner in which Spooner was addressing her
was inappropriate for an officer and she would remain
seated until he relented. She was reinstated, promoted
and her superior removed.
This episode is of a piece with others in her career
when she demonstrated courage, bloody-mindedness
and integrity, whether it was smuggling people over
borders in her car boot or standing up to (and winning
over) ambassadors, ministers and the occasional head
of state. Asked what she wished for her Somerville girls,
she unconsciously described herself: ‘The qualities
I would wish them (which I am not sure I can give) are
courage, stamina, intellectual curiosity, the desire for
excellence, an adventurous spirit and above all an
abiding belief in the decency of human beings.’
Almost everyone who worked with Daphne admired
and liked her. The verdict of one who knew her well
(not quoted in this book) is that ‘her forte was
intelligence diplomacy at which she was very good,
and also her ability to inspire younger members of the
office.’ Wherever she went, whatever she did, she made
a contribution that made a difference.
Alan Judd (Keble, 1972) is the authorised biographer of Mansfield
Cumming, founder of MI6, and served in the Foreign Office with
Daphne Park. His novels include an espionage trilogy (shortly to
become a tetralogy) and, like John le Carré, whose biography he
reviewed in the last OT issue, he writes under a pen-name.
In Oxford he was known as Alan Petty.
49
Common room Book essays and reviews
Charles Williams
The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop, OUP, £25
H
eralded by none other than Geoffrey
Hill in his valedictory address last year
as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Grevel
Lindop’s biography of Charles Williams
arrives with well-merited fanfare.
Despite the passionate advocacy of Hill and others
– not to mention Williams’ multifoliate output – it is
principally because of his association with C S Lewis
and J R R Tolkien that this ‘third Inkling’ remains
unforgotten. After rising from poverty, slogging his
way into a secure position at OUP in London, and
teaching adults in the East End, by the time he met
Lewis and Tolkien in 1934 Williams was reaching
critical mass. Lindop’s complex, warty portrait
will be troubling to many.
Williams had married the first woman he fell
for, a country lass spotted in a pageant. He
changed her name from Florence to Michal
(pronounced as Michael), fathered a son also
called Michael, and left them as often as possible
sequestered unhappily in Hampstead. When
not at Amen House, the London HQ of the
Oxford University Press, or beavering away at
his desk at home, Williams was always off
mysticising or lecturing, or (so it might seem
from the raptures inspired in his lecture
audiences) a brew of the two.
Lindop reconstructs his initiation into the
‘Fellowship of the Rosy Cross’ in 1917 (hand
tremors and poor eyesight excused him from
war service). Williams rose to the topmost grade.
By the end, however, it seems he may have been
using his weekly Fellowship schedule as cover to meet
Amen House librarian Phyllis Jones.
She was his muse when he began the Arthurian
sequence on which his poetic reputation rests, starting
with 1938’s Taliessin Through Logres, with its map of
Europe superimposed over a woman’s naked form. He
visualised the Grail quest happening on Phyllis’s own
body, yet believed that only by enforced chastity could
he aspire spiritually and creatively. She seems to have
seen the ‘punishments’ he dished out with pencils or
rulers across the palm (sometimes elsewhere) as good
fun. For him it was clearly a compulsion.
Ultimately he derived as much misery as Phyllis from
a love affair spanning several unconsummated years.
When Michal discovered it, and Phyllis began another
relationship, the situation grew more complicated.
Williams no longer visited her library, a staircase away.
But when he fell dangerously ill in 1933, he concluded
that his gut was the staircase, its blockage a corporeal
manifestation of his self-imposed ban.
Such symbolic superimposition was Williams’ talent.
He wrote masques for OUP which, Lindop shows,
inveigled the staff-actors into blessing the premises
50
ONLINE
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the week’
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bookoftheweek
with Rosicrucian ritual. After Phyllis left, he used his
OUP office for further sexually tinged domination
games, bound up with his mysticism, his criticism,
his thrillers, and his poetry. It is only this knot of
connections that justifies drawing us in as voyeurs.
Williams tried it on with an astonishing sequence of
women. One ‘disciple’ accepted that his mild sadism
released his creative powers, but also felt – with great
insight or charity – that it must ‘have caused him
a great deal of pain and bewilderment’. At least one
woman suffered significant psychological damage.
By the time Lindop’s narrative reaches the Inklings,
we already know Williams as intimately as it is possible
to know someone so secretive and strange.
Lindop suggests it was he who influenced
W H Auden to read Kierkegaard, thus
returning him to Christianity. Williams won
praise from W B Yeats, tickling his vanity with
a review of A Vision. Lloyd George, it is said,
thought Williams had one of the 12 best brains
in Britain.
Oxford made him unhappy – ‘heavy and
relaxed’ compared to the frenetic atmosphere
of the capital; it was ‘a kind of parody of
London’, he said. Living in South Parks Road
with the Spalding sisters – artist Anne and
actress Ruth – necessitated pitching in with
housework: when T S Eliot visited, he and
Williams compared bedmaking techniques.
He wrote relatively successful supernatural
thrillers, but saw criticism and poetry as his
real work. Yet it was not until 1944’s The Region
of the Summer Stars, his second Taliessin collection, that
his poetry sold healthily. ‘This selling of and passion
for my verse is something altogether new, and I want
to cry a little,’ he wrote. He died the following year
at the Radcliffe Infirmary after surgery for the old
intestinal problem. Lewis found out when he popped
in to see how his friend was doing, on the way to an
Inklings gathering at the Eagle and Child. There is no
evidence of what Lewis knew about Williams’ darker
side, if anything.
Errors exist – Nevill Coghill appears as ‘Neville’
– and we are told too often how Williams somehow
anticipated Chuck Palahniuk, or Jacques Derrida, or
whoever. But Lindop’s narrative, packed with incident
and parcelled into satisfying arcs, is exemplary. His
insights are hard-won from sometimes exceptionally
obscure source material; and where the darkness is
impenetrable he resists guesswork.
John Garth, former web editor for Oxford Today, is the author
of Tolkien and the Great War and the 2015–16 Fellow in
Humanistic Studies at the Black Mountain Institute,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
@oxtoday
Book essays and reviews Common room
The University of Oxford:
A History
By L W B Brockliss
Oxford University Press, £35
L
aurence Brockliss, history tutor
at Magdalen, has, over two decades,
researched and written this
magnificently readable, singlevolume history of the University. Spanning
800 pages, it is not a privateer effort as such,
sitting as it does atop the eight-volume history
produced by OUP. The particular benefits of
this volume are that it brings the story right up
to 2015, and that the author makes excellent
use of a comparative knowledge of higher
education in the UK and globally, to eliminate
accusations of institutional navel-gazing.
Oxford emerges brilliantly, but is utterly
imperilled for all that. ‘Digitalisation and the
new information technology threaten to make
the present structure of Oxford redundant.’
‘The problem in the modern era is that the
calls on a don’s time through the pressures of
teaching, research and administration make it
difficult for academics to step back and think
about the University in the long term. Reform
and restructuring is left to the University’s
administrators, who exist in their own
well-meaning world of managerialism and
government diktat and are as unlikely to
provide a blueprint for revolutionary change
as members of the fifteenth-century papal
curia were to carry through the Reformation.’
That last bit will be rehearsed with mirth,
but it’s not quite what the book actually says.
The lessons of history are contradictory:
Oxford cannot reform itself, but government
interference is of the wrong sort.
Professor Brockliss’ title is
promoted at £25 (RRP £35) at
the OUP bookshop upon
presentation of an Oxford
University Alumni or Bodleian
card, and also at Blackwells.
Both offers are valid until 30
June 2016.
Arcadian Nights:
Stories From
Greek Myths
Augustine:
Conversions
and Confessions
‘Dare Unchaperoned
to Gaze.’ A Woman’s
View of Edwardian
Oxford
By John Spurling
Duckworth, £18.99
By Robin Lane Fox
Allen Lane, £30
The author, who lives
partly in Arcadia, makes
plain, ‘My version [of
the Greek myths] is for
readers of all ages and
for entertainment and
not reference.’ The maps
and the experience of
living there brings it
all to life, the sunshine
and the skulduggery.
The sometime gardening
columnist for the
Financial Times and
Emeritus Fellow of New
College brings to life
late Roman antiquity,
and one of its most
enduring personalities.
Proclaimed as
a masterpiece, this is a
challenging read.
Crisis, Resilience
and Survival:
Lessons From the
Global Auto Industry
A Government
That Worked Better
and Cost Less?
Ed. Gabriel Gorodetsky
Yale University Press, £25
Three decades of
energetic public sector
reforming zeal since
Thatcher, and what do
we have to show for it?
In the words of one of the
(both Oxford) authors
of this brilliant, prizewinning work: ‘Higher
costs, more complaints.’
Of course, it’s complex...
The editor is a Fellow
of All Souls, and this an
abridgement of three
volumes. A miraculously
re-surfaced diary by
the Soviet Ambassador
to London from
1932-43. ‘Miraculous’
because it was written
at all; it survived
Stalin; and because it
has literary panache
too. More Pepys than
comradely virtue.
By Matthias Holweg
and Nick Oliver
Cambridge University
Press, £34.99
A timely publication
that brilliantly captures
a global industry
faced with chronic
overcapacity born of the
need to achieve size and
scale. The VW emissions
scandal gets its deeper
explanation as a result.
By Christopher Hood
and Ruth Dixon
OUP, £30
Ed. George Garnett
St Hugh’s, £20
A beautiful and valuable
hardback facsimile
and transcription of
a treasure of the St
Hugh’s archive, namely,
the joint diary of
Dorothy Hammonds
and Margaret Mowll,
undergraduates who
went up in 1905.
The Maisky Diaries
Oxford Alumni Cardholders are entitled
to a 15% discount at Blackwell’s
@oxtoday
51
PAINTING: IAN DAVIS
Common room Sensory Oxford
Sensory Oxford Common room
Sensory Oxford
Ian Davis takes a deep dive into the city’s
aromatic chapels, sunlit lawns and tactile
staircase handrails, for a new appreciation
The University
Museum
staircases
contain these
wonderfully
tactile, carved
ivy leaves,
which act as a
‘handbrake’
PAINTINGS BY IAN DAVIS
J
ohn Keats expressed it in a letter to Fanny
Brawne in 1819: ‘Nothing ever becomes real
till it is experienced.’
‘Seeing’ is one thing, ‘experiencing’ is
altogether different. Sounds, touch, balance,
humidity and temperature, the smells of wood and
furniture and cooking; a shaft of light. These are,
more often than not, how Oxford is recalled.
Gertrude Stein asked what constitutes a ‘sense of
place’: ‘The trouble with Oakland is that when you
get there, there isn’t any there there.’ Oxford’s
unloved and soulless Bonn Square comes to
mind – that odd adjunct of Queen Street, near
the Marks & Spencer.
The eighteenth-century English landscape garden
movement led by Capability Brown provides an
excellent counter-example of what makes a place
a place: unfolding sensory delights for perambulating
guests, bringing surprise, controlled views, tactile
sculptures, fragrant plants and the tinkling sounds
of fountains.
In Magdalen College, a visitor heading for the
grounds walks through the cloister where cold stone
walls echo with voices and footsteps, before being
compressed into a tunnel bursting into a sunlit
expanse of lawns and the New Building. From there
they cross a bridge into Addison’s Walk, providing
intermittent sights of the Bell Tower. One is struck
by the sounds of water, voices, feet on gravel paths,
the smell of sweet grass and the clunk of gates.
As part of the post-war enthusiasm for reform
(despite the fact that Oxford had not been bombed!)
urban planner Thomas Sharp wrote Oxford Replanned
(1948). He described Oxford as ‘a kinetic townscape’,
with an evocative description of the experience of
Radcliffe Square. Sharp invited readers to walk slowly,
heads held high to observe skylines, from the King’s
Arms pub at the end of Holywell Street to the High,
past the square Bodleian, the round Radcliffe Camera
and the triangular spire of St Mary the Virgin.
In 1962, as a young architect with five years of
‘visually-biased education’, I listened to some lectures
by a Danish Professor, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, on
‘Experiencing Architecture’. He described the wider
experience of architecture, not as mere photographic
images of developing styles. The importance of tactile
elements was emphasised while working in the office
of architect Jim Cadbury-Brown. We had a large lump
of plasticine in our office and staff would clench it.
From the average of these templates the exact profile
of the satisfying handrails used in the Gulbenkian
Hall of the Royal College of Art was created.
In Oxford’s Victorian masterpiece, the University
Museum, the talented Irish architect Benjamin
Woodward designed some wonderful stone staircase
handrails. Over many years these have been polished
by thousands of sliding hands, and at the half
landings – perhaps to indicate a change of direction
in the half light of the original gas-lights – he placed
ivy leaves, carved in stone to act as hand-brakes.
The wonderful seventeenth-century chapel of
Trinity College, currently being restored, has some
of the finest joinery and carving in Britain by
Grinling Gibbons, using limewood, cedar and juniper.
In 1748, Thomas Warton described the scent of the
juniper wood (or Bermuda cedar) that lined the new
chapel: ‘The work smells sweet, and carries the aroma
of fragrant Lebanon.’ Two hundred and sixty years
later, the Chapel still shares this subtle scent with
all who enter.
G E Street, possibly Britain’s greatest Victorian
architect, designed the splendid St Philip and St
James Church (now the Oxford Centre for Mission
Studies) in Oxford’s Woodstock Road as well as
London’s Royal Courts of Justice. He worked in
Oxford for just three years from 1852 and was
inspired by the city’s rich architecture. In 1870 he
wrote: ‘In Oxford I was taught how to become an
architect – but my best teacher was Oxford.’
Echoing college cloisters, stimulating walks,
well-tended gardens, an aromatic chapel and tactile
staircase handrails of this sublime city can have a
similar impact on anyone wanting to experience its
multi-sensory delights.
Ian Davis studied architecture in London and Atlanta. He lectured at
Oxford Brookes University from 1971 to 1989. A specialist in disaster
risk management, he is Visiting Professor at Kyoto, Lund and Oxford
Brookes universities. He is writing a book, Experiencing Oxford,
that seeks to expand on the sensory theme, to be illustrated with his own
watercolour paintings.
@oxtoday
53
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Art Common room
Painting the most
colourful professors
An interview with Oxford artist Francis Hamel by Christina Hardyment
KEITH STERN
KEITH STERN
F
rancis Hamel’s landscapes, murals and
portraits are sought after by collectors from
all over the world, but Oxfordshire is his
heartland. In 2012, he celebrated his love
of the city itself with an exhibition of paintings which
showed the city in all moods and weathers. His first
school was in North Oxford and, after winning a place
at Magdalen, he chose to study at Oxford’s Ruskin
School of Art. For the last two decades he and his
family have lived in a courtyard cottage in the gardens
of the great seventeenth-century house of Rousham.
He greets me with a preoccupied look when I call
by just before Christmas. Understandably. He is in
the middle of a demanding commission: celebrating
the first quarter-century of the University’s Cameron
Mackintosh Professorship of Contemporary Theatre
by painting portrait heads of all 25 of the
distinguished actors, impresarios, playwrights,
designers and directors who have held it. The
one-year post, established in 1990 to promote student
interest in contemporary theatre, was endowed by the
Cameron Mackintosh Foundation, and is allied to a
Fellowship at St Catherine’s College. The first holder
was Stephen Sondheim, the second Sir Ian McKellen.
During their year-long tenure, the professors give an
inaugural lecture open to the public on a topic of
their choosing, and run termly student workshops
and seminars. The current holder is Simon Russell
Beale; the last was Stephen Fry.
We stroll over to Hamel’s elegantly proportioned
studio in Rousham’s former stableblock, which was
designed in Palladian style by William Kent, who also
planned the gardens. Sturdy chairs flank a glowing
wood-burning stove, easels loom in corners and
a long workbench holds an armoury of much-used
brushes and palette knives and a confusion of
well-squeezed tubes of paint. Along another bench
are propped a dozen or more portraits in various
stages of completion. The actors are instantly
recognisable (a forthright Dame Diana Rigg,
a quizzical McKellen), the playwrights and directors
less so: ‘Directors don’t like to be painted. They prefer
to be the ones doing the looking.’ Unfinished as the
paintings are, their casually juxtaposed effect is
remarkably alive.
Hamel rises from his chair and rearranges the
canvases. Clearly, new ideas are rising in his head.
‘I work on all of the paintings as I go along, changing
and adding and subtracting. The whole enterprise is
given added depth because so many of the professors
have worked with each other at one time or another.
Painting a new subject often informs earlier ones.’
Francis Hamel
working on his
collection of
portraits for
St Catherine’s
College, Oxford.
Top: painting
Sir Ian McKellen,
second holder
of the Cameron
Mackintosh
Professorship of
Contemporary
Theatre
@oxtoday
Hamel began work early in 2015, and hopes to finish
in 2016. As the professors only occasionally visit
Oxford, most sittings involve his travelling to their
homes. This has its difficulties (‘Imagine a surgeon
having to operate on a kitchen table rather than
in hospital’), but is also illuminating. Squashed in
a corner of Rigg’s Chelsea flat, gazing at the Antony
Gormley figure rising from the Thames behind
McKellen’s house, and painting Peter Shaffer as he sat
utterly still at the oak table of his New York apartment
all gave Hamel a more complete sense of his subject.
Sondheim is fascinated by all things cryptic and
game boards hang on the walls of his dining room;
they are now hinted at behind the outline of his head.
‘I like my sitters to talk,’ says Hamel, ‘as I learn
a huge amount from the shifting collage of their
features during conversation. It contributes to the
narrative that is conveyed in the painting.’
Two of the early holders, Richard Attenborough
and Miller, have died, so Hamel had to work from
photographs and film footage. ‘I also asked their
friends if the painting felt like the person
they’d known,’ he says.
The heads are painted life-size, and each canvas is
33cm wide by 43cm high. ‘I want the collection to
work as a whole,’ Hamel explains. ‘It might be very
effective if they could hang in five rows of five.
I’m considering identical simple gilded frames, with
different colours for the outside edges.’ However they
are finally arranged, the portraits will undoubtedly
constitute a unique and extraordinary visual
celebration of the first 25 years of a unique and
extraordinary Oxford institution.
55
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The good sport Common room
The good sport
Cheering up
Neil Tweedie takes a look at Oxford’s hard-working cheerleaders
O
xford University’s cheerleaders are a –
well – cheery lot on the whole, as befits
an activity requiring prodigious levels of
enthusiasm. But nudge members of the
Sirens club on to the subject of what is and is not
a true sport, worthy of recognition with a Blue or
Half Blue, and the cheeriness takes a break.
Why, they ask in some frustration, is ‘dance sport’
(Latin and ballroom dancing to the rest of us)
considered worthy of such an accolade, when
cheerleading is not? You wouldn’t expect to break
your leg while dancing the rumba against Cambridge,
the Sirens point out, but such an injury – or worse
– is a distinct possibility in the physically demanding
world of ‘cheer’.
‘In terms of numbers of injuries, cheerleading is
one the most dangerous sports in the United States,’
says Ben Llewellyn, a Sirens coach. ‘Injury insurance
is certainly our biggest fixed cost as a club.’
Cheer, the pom-pom-twirling child of the
nineteenth-century American college system, is
a relatively recent import to these shores. But it is
now one of Britain’s fastest-growing sports, not least
at Oxford, which saw its first team formed in 2004.
This year’s cupper competitions in cheer are expected
to see 15 colleges competing for honours, as opposed
to just three two years ago.
Oxford University boasts two cheerleading teams,
one mixed ‘co-ed’ and one all-female, and they do
a lot more than twirl pom-poms on the sidelines
while chanting ‘rah rah rah’. Indeed, there’s not a
pom-pom in sight during the four-times-a-week club
training sessions at the Iffley Road training complex.
Competitive cheer is essentially the art of
performing challenging gymnastics while smiling
– and that megawatt rictus must be maintained, even
if the human pyramid that forms the centrepiece of
the sport implodes in a heap of flailing humanity.
‘Falling from ten feet if not caught properly is no
fun,’ says Llewellyn (Lady Margaret Hall, 2009), who
stayed on to coach the Sirens after graduating in
English Literature. ‘But the positive aspect is that you
bond quickly because you’re reliant on each other for
your safety. In rugby or football you want to be the
one to score the try or goal, but in cheer success is
always a team achievement.’
Each cheerleading side can field up to 32
performers per routine, and there are no gender
limits in co-ed cheer. Theoretically, a mixed squad
could be composed almost entirely of men. In reality,
women tend to be in the majority, although last year’s
Oxford co-ed team fielded 14 men out of a total of 30.
Oxford
University’s
cheerleaders
in training
@oxtoday
‘Cheer is one of the very few sports that is truly co-ed
with men and women competing together in a
fully-integrated team,’ says club member Katt Walton
(Christ Church, 2014). ‘The guys may do the bulk of
the lifting and the girls may be at the top of the
pyramids but they all do the same thing in training
– dance and gymnastics.’
Taster sessions held in Michaelmas term weed out
the faint hearts. About a quarter of the 100 or so
undergraduates who take part in the introductory
events go on to perform with the Sirens. Oxford
competes nationally and regionally and, of course,
against its ancient rival, Cambridge, in the guise of
the Cambridge Cougars. Last season, the all-female
squad won its region’s championships, beating
13 other teams to take first place.
‘What I personally love about cheer is how close
you get to your teammates,’ says 21-year-old Walton.
‘You’re throwing people in the air and their lives are
in your hands. People depend on you: if you don’t go
training the team can’t build its routine. You need
the commitment and motivation to improve.’
Angele Doakes is from Los Angeles and studying at
Jesus College for a term. A veteran of the sport in the
US, she’s one of the more experienced members of
the Sirens, albeit a short-lived one. ‘It’s a good way to
make friends and engage with students outside your
college,’ she says. ‘And there’s no better way to get fit.’
And what of that elusive Blue?
‘It’s an ever-raging debate,’ says Llewellyn.
‘In a university that recognises less-athletic sports
for a Blue, the argument against cheer becomes
more and more difficult to sustain.’
57
Bernard Leach
1887-1979
Drawings
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Food and drink Common room
Food and drink
An exciting Burgundy campaign
Oxford wine steward Hanneke Wilson considers the
promising 2014 Burgundy vintage just released
A
nyone can master Bordeaux, where the
geology is simple and the vineyards are
large and corporate-owned, but Burgundy
is a challenge: who can tell all the Moreys,
Ligniers and Rossignols apart? Why is X’s wine so
different from Y’s, when they farm abutting rows
of vines in the same vineyard? The long, narrow
escarpment now known as the Côte d’Or buckled
when the Alps were formed in the Cretaceous Period,
resulting in varying soils, bedrocks and exposures,
so that each vineyard has its own unique character.
The Napoleonic inheritance laws stipulated that all
children of a marriage should inherit equal shares
of their late parents’ estate, leading to vineyard
fragmentation. This was followed by complex
re-combination as Burgundians married
Burgundians, to augment their fragments.
You can trust an Oxford wine steward to relish ‘the
fascination of what’s difficult’. January was Burgundy
en primeur month, when we dashed from one tasting to
the next (nine this year). The Bordelais invite us to
buy on the basis of cask samples, which may or may
not represent the final blend in the spring, with the
wines delivered two years later. They don’t ask us to tie
up capital for two years: wines are offered for tasting
16 months after the vintage for delivery later in the
year. En primeur is a chance to buy at a discount or,
in the case of the scarcest wines, to buy at all.
Some of the wines will be cask samples, which are
unreliable, while newly-bottled wines may suffer from
‘bottle shock’. Predicting the future development of
the red wines is tricky: they can start off fruity, close
up for years and emerge from their sulks as mature
The Hôtel-Dieu
with its
polychrome
roofs, founded
as a hospital for
the poor in 1443,
now a museum
and venue of the
annual Hospices
de Beaune wine
auction
JOHN PICKEN PHOTO/FLICKR.COM
www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.
@oxtoday
today@admin.ox.ac.uk |
complex wines. Variation within a single vintage is
another complication, because in Burgundy we’re
near the northern cultivation limits for Chardonnay
(whites) and Pinot Noir (reds).
I didn’t buy any 2013s for Exeter: the wines were
soft and pretty but weren’t going to last long, and there
was enough in the cellar to sit out a mediocre vintage.
There was more of a buzz among Oxford buyers this
January, when we were shown the 2014s, a great
vintage for whites and a good, though more variable,
one for reds. The whites are harmonious and fresh,
with beautifully integrated acidity and thrilling
mineral depth. Bourgogne Blanc Les Chataigniers,
Domaine Hubert Lamy (privatecellar.co.uk, £135
per dozen) exemplifies the style of the vintage.
Chassagne-Montrachet 1er cru Maltroie, Domaine
Bernard Moreau is a beautiful wine, intense and
complex, with a long finish (owloeb.com, £195 per six).
The reds have lively acidity, fine tannins and delicious
juiciness. For a bargain, try Rully Rouge, Domaine
Jaeger-Defaix (flintwines.com, £96 per dozen).
Pommard 1er cru Clos des Poutures, Domaine Heitz
Lochardet has a lovely fragrance and purity of fruit,
with Pommard’s trademark tannins underneath
(flintwines.com, £205 per six). (Prices are given
‘In Bond’, with duty and VAT payable on delivery.)
Alas, these premiers crus used to be affordable for
Oxford cellars: my stocksheet tells its own sad tale
of rampant inflation, but how kind of the merchants
to show us these treasures.
Dr Hanneke Wilson (Merton, 1981) is the wine steward for
two colleges, Exeter and Lincoln
@oxtoday
59
Oxonian lives Portrait
Oxonian lives
APPLE (LEFT) AND PLAQUE (RIGHT CENTRE) IMAGES: OUI/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE
Portrait
Barrie Juniper
Oxford’s celebrated apple expert and botanist reflects
on his discoveries with Richard Lofthouse
I
‘meet’ Dr Barrie Juniper (St Catz, 1952) on the
long country lane that leads from the Pear
Tree roundabout to Wolvercote, and thence to
Wytham. We are both on bicycles, but his has
a secret electric motor allowing him to drift gently by,
pedalling a tall gear but not straining. A pedelec.
I notice unusual leather panniers (made by his
daughter, I learn later), which in the car park of the
White Hart decant bottles of frozen apple juice from
an apple harvesting event that Juniper presides over
each season in Beechcroft Road, Summertown,
where he lives. ‘Drink it quickly once thawed,’ he
advises with a grin, ‘otherwise fermentation will
begin and it will blow the door off your fridge.’
This is the man also known as ‘Mr Apple’.
An Emeritus Fellow in Plant Sciences at St Catherine’s
College, Juniper, at 83, has had a very illustrious
career as a botanist and geneticist at Oxford. Along
the way he engineered the building of four graduate
centres and the purchase of Harcourt Arboretum
out at Nuneham Courtenay, to this day a part of the
University under the wing of the Botanic garden.
Technically retired, he pursued a Leverhulme
Fellowship that from 1996 allowed him to dash
around all the recently opened-up ex-Soviet republics:
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan,
nearly but not quite into Afghanistan.
Juniper’s quarry was the DNA of as many wild
apples as possible, typically brought back not as
squishy fruit but as leaf samples. A then-new DNA
laboratory in Oxford sequenced the samples. A big
discovery, post-retirement, lay ahead, the subject of
a now famous book published in 2006, co-authored
with Professor David Mabberley, then at the
University of Washington.
Part of the context was Juniper’s former role
as a curator of the University Parks, a voluntary
role he assumed from the mid-1970s. He convinced
the then-Vice Chancellor Sir Richard Southwood to
grant a non-paying lease on a plot of land within
the walled garden at Wytham, which fell under
60
the jurisdiction of the University Parks. This plot
became an orchard, ‘a DNA apple library’.
We’re looking at it now, standing on sodden grass,
a drowsy sun trying to push through an all-tooEnglish bank of cloud, suspended somewhere
between seasons. Apples of all shapes and sizes are
heaving on the boughs of dozens of trees. He begins
to point them out – here Shakespeare’s favourite,
the Leather Coat; there an American Boston Russet.
I try a tiny, perfectly spherical yellow apple, called
Reinette Ananas for its pineapple aroma. At the base
of the trees are Latinate names on plaques.
Behind the orchard, Juniper recounts, was an
attempt to rescue from potential oblivion some of
the two thousand native varieties of British apple,
but more importantly to identify them according to
their DNA, with the hope of thrashing out once and
for all what they had in common and where they may
have originated in the murkier depths of time.
The extraordinary good luck of the timing of the
end of the Cold War (‘Nothing to do with me, you
understand!’) was that it recovered the pioneering
research of the Soviet botanist and geneticist Nikolai
Vavilov, starved to death by Stalin in prison in 1943
(a terrible and apparently deliberate irony given
Vavilov’s life’s work trying to eradicate famine).
Vavilov had dedicated his career to establishing the
origins of cultivated crops such as wheat and corn,
to better understand them. In the 1930s he created
the world’s largest seedbank, which has its echoes
in Juniper’s orchard. Vavilov did not establish the
origin of the apple – by which we mean here sweet,
edible apples rather than their many non-edible
counterparts – but he did point the way to the general
area of the Tien Shan, the thousand-mile mountain
range that stretches from China in the east to
Uzbekistan in the west.
‘It was long assumed,’ says Juniper, ‘that the apples
we eat were the product of complex hybridisation,
the result of human activity over centuries.’ But this
turns out to be false.
Shakespeare’s
favourite – in
Henry IV, Part 2,
Davy says to
Bardolph:
‘There’s a dish of
leathercoats for
you.’ Also known
as the russet or
‘rusticoat’
@oxtoday
OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS
The Story of
the Apple,
published by
Juniper and
Mabberley
in 2006 –
now sought
after and
something of
a classic in
its field
Yes, the innumerable native British varieties are the
One under an assumed English name, having made
product of out-breeding, but the many ducal names
a fortune from South African gold mining – Colonel
(he knows of six, such as the Duke of Devonshire)
Ffennell, originally Schumacher. Juniper points to
offer a plain clue as to the reality, which is that these
a lump of coral. The village is uplifted Jurassic reef
different apples are, genetically if not visually, just
perhaps 160 million years old. Juniper’s orchard sits
closely related cousins sprung forth by enterprising
in brick walls dating back to the 1840s.
gardeners in the undying quest for patronage.
In his own garden at home, Juniper (the name
‘Would his Lordship like a brand
is an Anglicisation of genevre and
new variety to be named after him?’
points to Huguenot ancestry) says
‘Yes please.’
he has just two apple trees: an
‘All two thousand British varieties
Allington Pippin and a Reinette
are from the same source, identical
Ananas. His all-time favourite,
to those on the northern slopes of
though, is Ashmead’s Kernel.
the Tien Shan.’ Those productive,
So why do we only eat Braeburns
verdant forests, which Juniper refers
imported from New Zealand?
to as primeval fruit forests, were the
Juniper’s answer is not sentimental.
original source of apples, millions of
He says that some British varieties
The Victorian orchard walls
years ago, which from around 1000
are not that tasty. Others do not
are dated by lead plaques
BCE were carried westwards by
travel well. The supermarkets
animals such as the horse, in human employ but long
have their own logistics – plus what the public
before the rise of the silk roads, and birds such as
evidently want, which is visual brightness, crisp
Cyanopica cyanus, the azure-winged magpie.
sweetness and a good shelf-life.
The fuller story is told in The Story of the Apple,
The only disappointment of the day is that we don’t
published by Juniper and Mabberley in 2006.
see fallow deer, buzzards or red kites, but the air is
It contains a number of caveats about the broader
laden with the sound of jackdaws and other common
hypothesis, but DNA sequencing has ‘mostly solved
garden birds, and the walled orchard testifies to its
the question’, says Juniper. ‘Just don’t for a minute
own history, the red brick walls full of handmade
think that apples are “English”. They’re from Eurasia,
Victorian nails that once held up trails of plum and
and much, much older than older generations of
apricot facing into the sun.
horticulturalists assumed.’
The deer come in to graze and the badgers also
It’s fun wandering with Juniper around Wytham,
delight in chomping apples, notes Juniper. But the
a once-feudal village bequeathed to the University
apple trees have served their main purpose and the
in 1943 by a German who bought it after World War
orchard is now a wild thing.
@oxtoday
61
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holidays to 70 classic cities and over 250 relaxing rural
locations throughout Europe and beyond.
Archaeological Tours
Food Tours
Gulet Cruises
Tour Operator of the Year 2015
- AITO (The Association of Independent Tour Operators)
A “100 Best Holidays” Company
2016, 2015, 2014 & 2011
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Unique Concierge Service
Kirker’s Concierge will arrange opera and ballet tickets,
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regularly visit the hotels and destinations that we feature so that
we can give you first hand advice.
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We have a range of special offers to include complimentary
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www.petersommer.com - Tel: 01600 888 220
The Ruskin
School of
Art
Fine Art Short Courses 2016
A modern tale of love
and suspense set in London
and South America at the
time of Pinochet’s régime
of terror in Chile, against
a background of high
mountains and deep
ravines, of human goodness
and inhuman cruelty, of
great wealth and extreme
poverty, of past colonization
and forced conversion,
of continuing exploitation,
of loss and reconciliation
‘Profoundly rich and transporting. This beautiful book plunged me
into another world.’
(Dr Andrea Ashworth, author of the bestseller Once in a House on Fire)
A ‘vertiginous tale of the flight of two lovers from across the racial
and class divide… A compelling and emotional experience.’
(Paul Simon, The Morning Star)
‘A literary masterpiece’ (Indiana Voice Journal)
An exciting selection of studio based courses
taught by leading artists and experienced tutors
at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
http://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/study/short-courses
Contact shortcourses@rsa.ox.ac.uk
Robert Southam is a graduate of New College, Oxford
Latest Amazon prices: £12-78 (paperback); £4-74 (e-book)
Published by John Hunt Publishing
Obituary Oxonian lives
Obituary
Lord Moser
C
laus Adolf Moser, Baron Moser KCB,
CBE, FBA, Warden of Wadham College,
Oxford, from 1984 to 1993, died on
4 September 2015, aged 92. Born in
Berlin, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker,
he escaped with his family to England in 1936. He
attended the progressive, co-educational Frensham
Heights School in Surrey then, after being interned
for three months at Huyton Camp, near Liverpool,
as an enemy alien (where he assisted a professor of
mathematics with a survey of the inmates), the
London School of Economics, where he switched
from commerce to statistics. From 1943 to 1946 he
served in the RAF, including as an interpreter in
Germany. On demobilisation he returned to the
London School of Economics as an assistant lecturer,
lecturer, reader, and from 1961 Professor of Social
Statistics. He was naturalised in 1947; he later referred
to himself as ‘73.5% English’ but ‘totally British’.
Moser gained his first taste of public service as
statistical adviser to the Committee on Higher
Education chaired by his friend and colleague Lionel
Robbins (1961-4), and headed the Higher Education
Unit set up to continue its work. From 1967 to 1978 he
was director of the Central Statistical Office and head
of the Government Statistical Service, working closely
with three successive prime ministers, and
introducing the General Household Survey and the
groundbreaking annual Social Trends publication.
Despite being a Labour supporter he refused to bow
to political pressures from either governing party, and
Harold Wilson always blamed him for the loss of the
1970 general election, a few days after the release of
a particularly poor set of balance of payments figures,
skewed by the purchase of jumbo jets (whose costs
Wilson had wanted spread over the year). From
1978 to 1984 he was vice-chairman of N M Rothschild
& Sons, remaining a director until 1990. He was also
chairman of the Economist Intelligence Unit (1979-83)
and a director of The Economist newspaper (1979-93).
He was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford,
from 1972 to 1980.
Moser’s tenure as Warden of Wadham College
(where the Sir Claus Moser Theatre is named in his
honour) was remembered for his weekly lunch parties
for undergraduates, his contributions to the musical
life of the college, and his fundraising activities; he
described his time at Wadham as ‘the happiest of all’
his careers. He was involved in a bewildering variety
of other societies and organisations. He was chairman
© TOM PHILLIPS; PHOTO: STUDIO EDMARK. BY PERMISSION OF THE ARTIST
AND THE WARDEN AND FELLOWS OF WADHAM COLLEGE
Warden of Wadham College
Sir Claus Moser,
later Lord Moser,
by Tom Phillips,
painted 1987-88,
now hanging in
Wadham College.
The background
identifies the
College through
the 200-year-old
Wadham beech
tree; the
characters are
from Lord Moser’s
favourite opera,
The Marriage
of Figaro
ONLINE
A fuller list of
obituaries is
available at:
oxfordtoday.
ox.ac.uk/obits
@oxtoday
of the Royal Opera House (1974-87), the advisory
board of Music at Oxford (1985-2009) and the
Oxford Playhouse Trust (1992-2004); chairman of
the British Museum Development Trust (1993-2003),
overseeing fundraising for the award-winning Great
Court; and a trustee of the Paul Hamlyn, Soros and
Rayne foundations. He was particularly active in the
field of education. ‘Education costs money, but then
so does ignorance,’ he declared, and he used his
presidential address to the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1990 to highlight poor
educational standards: ‘I suspect that at root Britain
– or perhaps I should say England – does not care as
much about education as other countries… The very
phrase “too clever by half” does not appear in other
languages.’ He was a member of the independentlyfunded National Commission on Education (1991-5),
which he helped set up, and later first chairman of
the Basic Skills Agency (1997-2002).
Short, balding from an early age, immaculately
dressed, sociable and charming, modest despite
his achievements, with a keen but kindly wit, Moser
continued to hold parties, to drive, and to visit the
opera until the last few weeks of his life. Among many
honours he was Chancellor of Keele University
(1986-2002) and the Open University of Israel
(1994-2004), and received some 20 honorary
doctorates; he was elected an FBA in 1969, knighted
KCB in 1973, and made a life peer in 2001. He is
survived by his wife Mary and their three children.
Obituary writen by Dr Alex May (St John’s, 1982),
research editor at Oxford DNB.
63
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64
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65
Oxonian lives My Oxford
My Oxford
What kind of student were you?
Diligent, in the sense that I did the reading lists.
I worked in the Taylorian, and the Duke Humfrey.
I soon realised that there’s no point merely making
copious notes: you have to think. You have to distil
the essence. This has served me well in the City.
What was your social life like?
The St Anne’s bar was wonderful. It was run by the
students for students. We had our own G&T glasses.
It was fun. We had a great jukebox, a superb buttery;
and we played endless games of Risk and Scrabble.
In retrospect it all seems very offline; the better for it.
Did you take part in any extra-curricular activities?
I coxed because I was small and light. I loved it.
I remember breaking the ice on the river on some
winter mornings, and the plish-plash of the oars, in
time and at full whack. It was a beautiful feeling.
St Anne’s, 1989
What were your tutors like?
Julie Dean
One of the UK’s leading fund managers talks to
Richard Lofthouse about what Oxford gave
her, and how it continues to influence her work
at Sanditon Asset Management
What first made you think about studying at Oxford?
I grew up in Bolton and my family was in farming.
I read widely from an early age and began to realise
that there were alternatives to milking cows at 4am.
After O-levels, I persuaded my grandfather, T J Stokes
– who owned the eponymous optician in Bolton – to
sponsor my A-levels at Bolton School for Girls, a private
school. I began with physics, maths and chemistry.
He wanted me to take on his business! After one
week I went to him and said, ‘It’s all gobbledygook.’
I changed to what I loved, the arts; especially history.
I had an inspirational history teacher, Mrs Palmer. She
encouraged me to apply to Oxford for history, having
been to St Anne’s herself. Neither I nor my parents
knew anything about Oxford before that.
66
Has your Oxford qualification helped in your career?
In the markets, you take a risk. In trying to be right you
bear the risk of being wrong, but you own the decision;
and you are absorbed by it. Oxford gave me that sense
of being absorbed. Being a fund manager is not
dissimilar. In fact, I could expand the parallel. You have
to be interested in all things to be a successful fund
manager. Studying history at Oxford gave me that.
What have you taken away from Oxford?
Julie Dean in the
arms of her
rowing crew,
when she coxed
for St Anne’s
What were your impressions of Oxford at the time?
I didn’t have that sense of being intimidated by old and
beautiful buildings, being at St Anne’s! I was quite
surprised that I was there and very excited about what
was going to happen. I had no sense of elitism, actually.
Nineteen eighty-nine was after the Sloane Ranger
diaries came out [The Official Sloane Ranger Diary, 1982]
– but I observed none of that at St Anne’s. I experienced
no relief or disappointment about this; it felt normal.
I very fondly remember going to Balliol to tutorials with
Maurice Keen, the medieval historian. His course was
something like ‘Baronial families in the 11th century.’
It was fascinating, and he was such a character. We
genuinely drank sherry in his tutorials – something
you’d read about but didn’t think happened.
I still remember my first tutorial. It was about the
survival of Old English after the Norman Conquest
– I remember the silence that followed reading out my
essay. And the polite evisceration of the argument that
followed. That’s what Oxford taught me – the ability
to think clearly, to lose peripheral distractions.
It was hugely different from the sixth form, and the
academic experience of the tutorial was in that sense
transformative. I’d like to express gratitude that I didn’t
appreciate at the time, for that academic experience.
I guess what I have taken from it is that it is very
important to do something you enjoy, and do it for
its own sake.
How do you think of Oxford now?
ONLINE
To read more
interviews go to:
bit.do/otinterviews
It’s still beautiful, of course. I’m not close enough
to judge the atmosphere. I suspect current
undergraduates may be more anxious than we were.
They’re facing global competition from day one; we
were enjoying the optimism and joy that came with
the fall of the Berlin Wall, as those barriers opened.
@oxtoday
16−18
6
John Cairns Photography
S
R
YEA
Alumni Weekend in Oxford
16 –18 September 2016
Take part in an inspiring series of talks, tours, tastings, workshops,
Departmental Open Houses and College events.
More than 1,000 alumni are expected to attend this year’s tenth anniversary Alumni Weekend in Oxford.
Whether you can join us for three days, or can only drop in for a couple of hours, we hope that you’ll find
something in our programme to tempt you.
Speakers confirmed so far include:
 Professor Louise Richardson,
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford
 The Rt Hon the Lord Patten of Barnes, CH,
Chancellor of the University of Oxford in
conversation with diplomats
 Gerard Baker,
Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal
 Sir David Normington,
First Civil Service Commissioner
 Ruby Wax, comedian and campaigner
 Mara Yamauchi, marathon runner
Booking opens in June
www.alumniweekend.ox.ac.uk
Welcome to your Club
For nearly 200 years alumni have chosen to take up membership of a spacious and elegant private
club in the heart of the West End. The Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall is the perfect place
to meet for a drink, entertain friends and colleagues in magnificent surroundings, play squash,
take a break, host a party or just find a quiet corner to prepare for a meeting. A thriving social
scene, sports facilities, a lively calendar of events including talks, tastings, dinners and balls,
an exceptionally well-stocked library, extensive wine cellars and more than 40 bedrooms mean
our members use their club for recreation, relaxation and business - and now you can too.
For more details please visit www.oxfordandcambridgeclub.co.uk or call 020 7321 5103

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