Even those who have not yet seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake will have been hard pressed to escape the posters prominent in the tube throughout the noughties or else might have caught Adam Cooper’s brief appearance as the swan at the end of Billy Elliot. The production is now in its fifteenth year, making it the longest running ballet in both the West End and on Broadway, which is a tribute to the brilliance of Bourne’s choreography, design and eye to detail. What struck me the most when I watched it recently, for the third time, was how the dance has matured with time. Whether I had become more astute or whether Bourne has refined and developed the production, I could not say, yet I certainly understood much more what Bourne is getting at. The development of Swan Lake owes much to both Bourne’s later productions (in particular The Car Man and Dorian Grey ) and to the triumphs of the Gay Rights Movement in the new millennium. The prince is not driven into the arms of a m ...

The election of Barack Obama was accompanied by great hope that the damage wrought by the Bush administration's foreign policy could be mended. Obama's campaign team emphasized the fresh approach that would follow an Obama victory. Much has been made of the apparent failure of his efforts so far: coming face to face with the difficult realities of American foreign policy, the Obama administration has faltered. The Arab-Israeli peace process remains deadlocked. After the early promise of the Cairo speech, in which the president indicated that pressure would be put on the Israeli government to halt settlement construction, his administration has fallen back on the easy answer that the Arabs must do more to ease Israeli worries. Thousands of miles away, one can hear Netanyahu's relieved sigh. Despite a new strategy in Afghanistan, there has been little progress. On Saturday, the coalition's highly-anticipated Operation Moshtarak, intended to signal U.S. General Stanley McChrystal's empha ...

In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2 , I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyric ...

It needed to be written. A predictable wistful-turn-of-the-decade-piece hailing the end of the Noughties and the inevitable onset of the Tens (not quite as catchy. Tennies? Sounds a bit like over-the-counter diarrhoea medication. Give me time on this one) and a bit of token drivelling about the internet now being a vital yet terrible extension of our personalities and the carbon footprint that is ominously stamped all over our middle class fun... Well I refuse to give in. I like the 21st century and all of the soullessness it delivers. I like the convenience of expressing the very depth of my soul through one sentence in a neat little box beneath my Facebook profile picture. Now finally the emotionally awkward have a chance to communicate love/sadness/confusion through handy specific combinations of punctuation, :-) indeed. I enjoy the enigmatic nature of “Maybe Attending” events, shamelessly Wiki-ing my way through higher education, and being able to Google all those annoying th ...

The Alligator's Mike Webb talks to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, the Shadow Security Minister and David Cameron's National Security Adviser, about Afghanistan, tackling violent extremism at home and abroad - and why investment banking is great preparation for politics. ...

One of my first thoughts when snow started to fall across the south of England a week before Christmas was how tremendously pretty Oxford would look in such weather, with the Bodleian frosted over and the college quads carpeted in white (and probably full of over-excited, snowball-wielding students). It wasn’t until a little while later that I thought vaguely of the Big Issue seller who I passed on my way to lectures, standing by Blackwell’s every day during term that I considered the fact that, for those without a roof over their heads, Oxford in snow is probably the first definition of downright grim. The massive homelessness problem was one thing which I – perhaps naïvely – was not prepared to find in Oxford. Over the Christmas vacation, my first time back at home, people kept asking me “was it how you expected?” and I suppose, for the most part, it actually was. I had known there would be slightly quirky traditions, I came with some expectation of tourists (although ...

Nearly a century and a half has passed since an extraordinary yet iconic meeting of minds took place at the Oxford University Museum. In June 1860 a range of renowned British scientists and philosophers gathered for a public discussion centred on the findings of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species . It is said that during the debate Anglican leader Bishop Wilberforce asked Darwin’s advocate Thomas Henry Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed descent from a monkey; Huxley allegedly responded by declaring he would rather be descended from a monkey than hold any connection to a man who used his intellect to obscure the truth. If we were to hold a rematch and bring the debate about the meaning of scripture, the value of religious faith, the very existence of God, then what would the scene look like? When evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens take to the pulpit – only to be shouted down in turn by Bible-bashing ...

In 1791 a vast outdoor exhibition took place in Prague to mark the coronation as King of Bohemia of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. The celebrations included the first performance of what was to be Mozart’s penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito. Its story, of an emperor who shows mercy even to those who plot against him, was no doubt intended to appeal to a ruler who had already pursued peace in Europe with considerable intelligence and skill. The century following Leopold’s death was dominated by a period of enlightenment and increasing industrialization, during which Bohemia witnessed a sea-change in the form of the Czech National Revival. Although still technically part of Austro-Hungary, the Czechs under the Revivalists laid claim to their own history, culture and most importantly their original language. All of this was reflected in the 1891 centenary exhibition, this time held in a purpose-built ‘crystal palace’ at Holešovice, in the loop of the river Vltava. ...

In Britain, we like to think of ourselves as fairly rational. However bad we are, at least we accept overwhelming scientific evidence. We might fly more than anyone in the world, but we feel slightly guilty because we know that we’re burning the atmosphere up. Our education system is a shambles, but at least some of our children have heard of Darwin. With regard to the war on drugs however, this week our government abandoned such principles by sacking David Nutt - previously their chief scientific advisor - for criticizing the government approach to drugs classification. No longer is drug policy based on science. Instead, it has become an article of faith that drugs are bad, and policy works from there. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic, even our most respected scientists. Mr Nutt’s sin in this case was simply stating was has been obvious to most young people for years anyway. Outside of crack cocaine and heroin, most illegal drugs are much less harmful than our legal drugs ...

This summer I was lucky enough to visit two very different countries. The only immediate similarity I can think of is that they were both in their own way superlative: India, the world’s largest democracy; and Belarus, ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ (according to Condoleezza Rice). However, symptomatic of my cultural nosiness, as I travelled through these countries I made a point of speaking with as many of their students as I could. It was from these conversations that another similarity arose – that despite my admiration of many aspects of these foreign cultures they each inspired in me a great pride in Britain. My pride was thankfully not too predictable. I wasn’t having thrills about our civilised tea parties or tripping on a patronising diagnosis of their political systems. I was proud of British universities. "In Britain, I declared, anyone can afford to go to university" I know it sounds obvious, but sometimes you need a harsh juxtaposition to prove what yo ...

It could have been worse. He could have been naked, or covered in glitter. But for the Shoreditch lad caught vomiting outside a bar by Google Street View in March, such thoughts were probably of little consolation. His face was, after all, caught on camera for every Internet user’s viewing pleasure. As was his friend, with the reindeer antlers. The pertinent question which Google Street view has raised is: can we justify this amount of surveillance? And how much is too much? The Google Street View application covers 22,360 miles of road in 25 cities in the UK. Thousands of people have been caught on camera; hundreds have since requested their images be removed. The same cannot be said for the millions of CCTV cameras in the country, which log our everyday moves. We cannot ask to have ourselves taken out of every film recorded; and besides, the sheer number of cameras - about one for every fourteen people in Britain – would make the job impossible. You may find the idea of the drun ...

With the government having in principle signed up to renewing its rusting fleet of nuclear power plants, environmentalists seem to be in disarray as to what their reaction should be. Some in the green movement such as Mr Tindale, former head of Greenpeace and a one-time outspoken critic of nuclear power, say they have now changed their mind over the issue, whilst others, such as the UK Green Party, remain vehemently opposed to the idea. Mr Burns' choice What issues are at stake? The first is, of course, the potential health risk associated with nuclear power. The various catastrophes which have marred the world-wide image of nuclear energy – most notably the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents - have served as powerful ammunition to those who say that the potential for disaster, even if very unlikely, simply constitutes too great a risk. Even reasonably well-worn nuclear power plants have had their fair share of bad exposure (excuse the pun!) with a few striking incidents su ...