In this second campaign, Johnson also worked his charm beyond his base. Gove, a fresher in 1985, told Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson: “The first time I saw him was in the union bar … He seemed like a kindly, Oxford character, but he was really there like a great basking shark waiting for freshers to swim towards him.” Gove, who campaigned for him, admits: “I was Boris’s stooge.” And then, using almost the same phrase as Toby Young: “I became a votary of the Boris cult.” He thinks the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge has a deleterious effect on British life. “You’re telling 99 per cent of the population: ‘You are never going to be a senior politician, a judge, a newspaper editor, a civil servant… goodbye, you’re done.’ And you say to the 1 per cent, ‘As long as you don’t commit rape and murder, you’re fine. We’ve let you in through the gate.’ It’s hugely pernicious. And it doesn’t allow for development at different ages. It doesn’t allow for lifelong learning. And it’s very much based on birth and school.” This captivating A-Z compendium by #KateSummerscale explores the world in 99 obsessions - from spiders to clowns to all that will make your skin crawl. Kuper is considered one of the most influential voices at the Financial Times. [17] Since joining the publication in 1994, he has held various roles, writing on a wide range of topics, from sports and popular culture to politics. [18] [19]

How can you tell a man attended Oxford?” Victor Lewis Smith once joked. “Because he’ll tell you in the first sentence.” For most of us, the subject is irrelevant, boring and self-absorbed. Oxford is barely worth a day trip; the centre of the city looks pretty in summer, but most of it’s a dump, and a cup of tea won’t get you much change out of a fiver. I taught history at the University of Sussex, in Brighton, and much preferred it. Oxford doesn’t have a pier.Even during the 1980s when only 13% of people went to Higher Education, less than 0.5% of those graduated from an Oxbridge College, yet 13 of the 17 post war Prime Ministers graduated from Oxford University. Four of them educated at one very exclusive private school in Berkshire (you know the one) Gove grew into a recognisable Oxford character in outsized glasses, speaking with an exaggerated oratorical air even in daily life. When the future Guardian journalist Luke Harding arrived at Oxford in 1987, Gove led his freshers’ tour of the union. “He was basically the same [as in 2021],” recalls Harding. “He had this preternatural self-confidence, this faux-courtly manner. He seemed somewhat parodic, someone who wasn’t going to flourish in the real world.” Yet he has gone on to become the Jeeves to Johnson’s Wooster. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. In early 1983, as a diffident grammar school boy, I sat in a centuries old sitting room, beside a burbling open fire, enduring an interview for a place to study English at Oriel College, Oxford. I was muttering something about Shakespeare.

Football Against The Enemy: the story behind the story | Sporting Intelligence" . Retrieved 2 July 2023. A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit ... perceptive and full of surprises' In his 2019 diary, following the election of the current Prime Minister, Alan Bennett wrote “It’s a gang, not a government.”

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Discover the captivating origins and hidden meanings of the flags that we all know today in this sparkling tour through this universal subject! Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press. They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. Interview, Oxstu Profile (5 June 2023). "In conversation with Simon Kuper". The Oxford Student . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Adam Sisman`s definitive biography, published in 2015, revealed much about the elusive spy-turned-novelist; yet le Carré was adamant that some subjects should remain hidden, at least during his lifetime. #TheSecretLifeOfJohnLeCarré is the story of what was left out, and offers reflections on the difficult relationship between biographer and subject. More than that, it adds a necessary coda to the life and work of this complex, driven, restless man.

During the Second World War, Edward Heath was mentioned in dispatches and awarded an MBE for active service in the Normandy landings. “He said later that seeing Europe destroy itself again left him ‘with the deep belief that remains with me to this day: that the peoples of Europe must never again be allowed to fight each other’. In 1973, he took the UK into the EEC.”The sway Oxford has had and continues to have over the UK and beyond is grim as it is depressing. I think one of Kuper’s main advantages is that he is both an insider and outsider, an insider as he studied there for four years, and an outsider because he isn’t English and is a foreigner. So he gets both fresh perspective and first-hand experience, which brings an element o Simon Kuper is a British, and naturalized French, author and journalist, best known for his work at the Financial Times and as a football writer. After studies at Oxford, Harvard University and the Technische Universität Berlin, Kuper started his career in journalism at the FT in 1994, where he today writes about a wide range of topics, such as politics, society, culture, sports and urban planning. [2] Chums has its inevitable chapter on the antics of Boris Johnson and David Cameron at the “Buller”, a cosplay England of mustard-coloured waistcoats and social condescension. Those were the days. Beyond the panelled debating chambers and honey-stoned colleges, modernity and change could feel like decline. Progress could feel like decline. Little wonder, then, that Kuper identifies Oxford as the incubator of Brexit. Kuper has written several books, starting with the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy (1994), which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. [25] The Times wrote of the book: "If you like football, read it. If you don't like football, read it." [26]

The best ever written dissection of the formation for what passes as the modern Tory Party's leadership'Rees-Mogg wasn’t ancestrally posh. Instead, he “adopted the persona of the institutions he attended”, diagnoses his contemporary Owen Matthews, who believes that this began as a defence mechanism for a thin, bookish child. Arriving at Oxford in 1988, he instantly became an unmissable sight, a rail-thin teenager promenading along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar, in a double-breasted suit with an umbrella. In that time and place, it was about the most unconventional outfit imaginable. I don't want to put in any spoilers but Kuper quietly builds up a case to show the generation of Oxford Tories, were shaped by the empty debating rhetoric of the Oxford Union and the facile skills that PPE degrees inculcated into them (basically to acquire the sheen of knowing the surface detail of many things but nothing of substance). These forces created the empty and spineless political class so typical of Cameron, Johnson and Gove. What aside from gaining and holding on to power did these men believe in? These were not able and serious people yet they have and continue to wield real power of millions of Britons. An excellent book that explores how the UK has been ruled by an entitled elite whose abilities depend on family networks, the right schools, a chumocracy and , above all, the ability to form an argument on any topic irrespective of any in depth understanding of the subject at hand or its repercussions. DisobedientBodies explores society’s patriarchal and capitalist beauty standards and calls on us to rebel against them! This is a powerful and inspiring new way of looking at beauty. Johnson, Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Gove and Cummings all feature in this look at the hidden depths of our current political establishment and its inextricable link to Eton and, in particular, Oxford University'