It took the final election result of 2010 before I truly understood the early eighteenth century. On the morning which marked the consummation of the New Politics, a noted, hirsute Liberal Democrat activist approached me over breakfast and shook me by the hand. This being Balliol JCR, I was the best he could do by way of symbolic Toryism: an underwhelming, motheaten tiger in a zoo more noted for its herbivore collection. "Welcome to government," I said, feeling uncomfortably far from satire. ‘The Coalition’ suffers from problems of definition more, I think, than from those of will. That bald ‘Coalition’ won’t do alone; it sounds dystopian, the government in a book by Cormac McCarthy or Magnus Mills, encompassing shades of the unsuccessful Mitchell and Webb sketch about the post-apocalyptic ‘Emergency’. My instinct – after considering the social ramifications of ‘The Operagoing Coalition’ – was to go back rather further. The first internet suggestio ...

“It’s something like the priesthood now,” my then tutor said a while ago, adjusting her cassock. She had heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and consequently wanted to enact a chat, and, I assume, a sanity check. For myself, I’ve always heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and rarely paid them overmuch attention. “I mean,” she continued, “do you know what you want to do, what it is? It requires a sort of cold, full-on dedication now, of course. The gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist anymore.” The chick had, naturally, got to the node of the matter. I’m aware that the gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist, that we’ve gone from Sliggers (see prior article) to sloggers, but I am young and foolish and, in my moments of reconciling myself to the Worship of Athena, I do like to think I could help to reverse that process. In this article I will try and articulate how, by musing on what the academy was, what it is, and what it might become, in two ...

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 ...

An excerpt from a great work of literature always makes a good talking-point, and so I selected for this article’s title an utterance of Horace Slughorn, the Potions Professor at Hogwarts during Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince . Professor Slughorn is here expressing his disappointment at failing to receive Sirius Black as a pupil along with the rest of the Black family. Like any discerning cultural commentator, on returning from a recent holiday I rushed to watch the new Harry Potter film. It had met a mixed word-of-mouth reception, but I enjoyed it about as much as I had expected to, and especially Jim Broadbent as the said Slughorn. Broadbent’s performance embodied a skilfully rendered cliché, one that has popped up a lot in reaction to paedophile hysteria, and in the wake of The History Boys – namely that of the pleasant and unaggressive academic pederast.Yet while this archetype has tripped merrily from Sir John Falstaff, to many a mid-20th century novel, to Martin ...

Some weeks ago, a woman in London sent a round-robin e-mail about helping a friend of hers get a job. This friend was, our protagonist suspected, in money difficulties; she was in direct competition with a brash, rich, and “creepy” foreigner, probably lacking in professional commitment. Everyone rallied round and talked to the right people and the nice woman indeed got the job – a heartwarming tale for hard times, perhaps. The rescued princess was Ruth Padel, just installed as Oxford Professor of Poetry, and the company of urban knights rejoiced in repulsing the old dragon of St Lucia, Derek Walcott. There can be no doubt that the Padel cavalry understood the full nobility of their cause and their actions. Their damsel, our original storyteller pointed out, was “involved and giving”. Exactly how involved she was was to become a more important question as the campaign progressed, but for the moment let that pass. In contrast Mr. Walcott was to slither all the way from New Yo ...

JEZ: We’re in the Euro now and there’s nothing you can do about it. MARK: We are not in the Euro! Peep Show is the cultural achievement most universally feted across the media, from the Guardian to the Telegraph to the blogosphere. But where its own political position stands – in the words of Super Hans, “a deal-breaker”, whatever it may be – requires a lot of analysis, both direct textual interpretation and careful visual and verbal inference. The lagubrious Mark shall form a blacksuited Charon to a whole political underworld; one that may yet be revelatory as a means of prophecy of the next election, and beyond. Politically, he is extremely unlikely to get out of bed at election time but probably sees himself as left-wing, as this tends to be more consistent with his “sensitive” womanising routine. MARK I eat red meat and don't necessarily think money or Tony Blair are a bad thing. Mark Corrigan was born and bred in Middle England. His father, an as ...