Oxford today 2016 digital

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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EDITOR: Dr Richard Lofthouse DIGITAL EDITOR: Olivia Williams ART EDITOR: Christian Guthier HEAD OF DESIGN AND PUBLICATIONS OFFICE: Anne Brunner-Ellis SUB-EDITOR: Jayne Nelson PICTURE EDITOR: Joanna Kay ART DIRECTOR: Paul Chinn

Welcome

Oxford Today Welcome

2016 TRINIT Y TERM

Anne Brunner-Ellis, Head of Design and Publications Office, University of Oxford Jo Dunkley, Associate Professor in Astrophysics, Fellow, Exeter College, Oxford Tom Dyson, Director, Torchbox Liesl Elder, Director of Development, University of Oxford Christine Fairchild, Director of Alumni Relations, University of Oxford Jeremy Harris, Director of Public Affairs, University of Oxford Tom Hockaday, technology transfer consultant Nicolette Jones, author and journalist Martin Leeburn, PR consultant and former journalist Seamus Perry, Professor of English Literature, Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford Dr Richard Lofthouse, Editor, Oxford Today Ken Macdonald QC, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford Sue Unerman, Chief Strategy Office, MediaCom Dr Helen Wright, Member, 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

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Front cover: A portrait of the ill-fated Cecil by Andy Loveridge from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU)

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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

10 News

Shaping the world

38

14 The big picture 17 Research 20 Oxonians 23 Alumni voices

Features

26 Bottling the sun

How the quest for commercially viable nuclear fusion stands: an update

32 Tossed not sunk

Pondering the parlous state of modern French intellectualism

38 The lion, the web and the WildCRU

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42

How the illegal death of Cecil the lion changed conservation - an insider’s tale

42 Doing 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

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49 Book reviews 52 Sensory Oxford 55 Art 57 Good sport 59 Food and drink

Oxonian lives 60 Portrait 63 Obituary 66 My Oxford

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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,

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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

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Letters Your voice

Email your letter to: oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Even if you are an alumna/alumnus, you can opt to click ‘Other’ under ‘Affiliation’, when registering at bit.do/otweekly. No need then to type in your alumni number.

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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

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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Shaping the world The big picture

The big picture

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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.

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CHRIS WOOD, OXFORD MEDICAL ILLUSTRATION AND NICOLA FAWCETT, LIVINGINAMICROBIALWORLD.WORDPRESS.COM

Find out more about the study: armordstudy.wordpress.com

15

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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.

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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.’

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© 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.

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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

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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

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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!’

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 Alumni. If you have any questions or would like more information please get in touch.

pompeii - lives of the romans with Dr Damian Robinson

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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 Bradt Travel Guide to Albania. Discover Byzantine churches, Ottoman mosques, wildflower dotted mountain landscapes and receive unique access to some of Albania’s finest sites and museums.

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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Nuclear fusion Feature

EURATOM/CCFE FUSION ASSOCIATION

‘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

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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’

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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

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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.

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Feature French intellectuals

Tossed not sunk Helen Massy-Beresford asks why French intellectual culture is in the doldrums

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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

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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.

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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

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‘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.”’ www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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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’

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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.

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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.

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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

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Feature Cecil and WildCRU

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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

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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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

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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53

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Art Common room

Painting the most colourful professors An interview with Oxford artist Francis Hamel by Christina Hardyment

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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

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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

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOHN CAIRNS

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

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‘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

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

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

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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

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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

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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’

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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.

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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 www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk | oxford.today@admin.ox.ac.uk |

© 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

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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.

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65

Oxonian lives My Oxford

My Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/RICHARD LOFTHOUSE

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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