Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Steve Pratt and Emma Croager
Most adults won’t be familiar with the music video You Make Me Feel by Cobra Starship, as it has much greater appeal to young people. There is little doubt however that the overwhelming majority of adults would quickly identify the product placement in the video. The commercial intent of the product placement in this example is self-evident.
By David Leopold
William Morris (1834-1896) is widely recognized as the greatest ever English designer, a poet ranked by contemporaries alongside Tennyson and Browning, and an internationally renowned figure in the history of socialism. However, since the year 2013 offers no ‘big’ anniversary as a pretext to survey these various major achievements, I will instead use 24 March (his birthday) as an excuse to look at how Morris actually spent some of his own birthdays.
Oxford University Press is sad to hear of the passing of Chinua Achebe. The following is an excerpt from The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by John Gross.
By Malcom Gaskill
I’m looking at a photo of my six-year-old daughter wearing her witch costume – black taffeta and pointy hat – last Halloween. Our local vicar marked the occasion by lamenting in the parish magazine this ‘celebration of evil’. All Hallows’ Eve, the night when traditionally folk comforted souls of the dead, is not, in fact, evil, but did once have evil in its margins. Spirits on the loose might be bad as well as good, and for humans to manipulate them was witchcraft. The perception of evil, concentrated in the figure of the witch, was once powerfully real. Kate’s fancy dress character, however winsome, has a profound cultural connection to a terrifying dimension of the past and, as we’ll see, the present too.
We’re very pleased to annouce the winner of the Very Short Film competition 2013. The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012.
By Robert Morrison
According to Gerard Manley Hopkins, when Thomas De Quincey was living in Glasgow in the mid-1840s he “would wake blue and trembling in the morning and languidly ask the servant ‘Would you pour out some of that black mixture from the bottle there.’ The servant would give it him, generally not knowing what it was. After this he would revive.” What “it” was, of course, was opium, the drug that De Quincey became addicted to in 1813 — two hundred years ago this year.
Somehow, I’ve made it into my 30s without ever having listened to Bob Dylan‘s first album. That is, not that I can remember; my mother informed me over the weekend that I indeed heard it many times as a young one, but truth be told I don’t remember much from my diaper-wearing days (but we’ve already gone over how terrible my memory is).
By James David Christie
The world lost one of its greatest and most beloved musicians on 26 February 2013, when the great teacher, recording artist and organist, Marie-Claire Alain, passed away in her 87th year. She was among the very few organists known in households around the world. She was usually referred to as the “First Lady of the Organ” and she was definitely that, but I always thought she should have been more appropriately called the “Greatest Organist in the World”
By Ian Donaldson
Some years ago, while I was working in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, I was about to give a lecture on Ben Jonson when the telephone rang. It was the Canadian High Commission on the phone. A small delegation (I was told) was just setting out to hear the lecture, and wanted more precise directions to the place where I’d be speaking.
By William Kinderman
Two centuries after Richard Wagner’s birth in 1813, his final music drama Parsifal continues to exert uncanny fascination, as Francois Girard’s new production at the Metropolitan Opera shows. For much of his life, Wagner was captivated by the legends of the Holy Grail; this “stage consecration festival play” is his culminating work. Dark episodes in Parsifal’s performance history display clearly the risks of its aesthetic treatment of redemption, which can project a hypnotic portrayal of collective identity.
The 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne died on March 18 1768. During a recent trip to OUP’s out of print library in Oxford, we came across the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition of his novel A Sentimental Journey, which included an introduction by none other than Virginia Woolf.
By Patricia Fara
The world, wrote Darwin, resembles ‘one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’ Unexpectedly, that fine image of competitive natural selection was created not by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), but by his grandfather Erasmus (1731-1802)
By Miles Hollingworth
We have a new Pope: Francis — a name honouring St. Francis of Assisi, who venerated poverty and recommended it to his followers. In the build up to his election, a good deal of attention was naturally directed to the challenges facing the Catholic Church. Not least of these is the question of social justice and the plight of the global poor.
By Greg Woolf
Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on.
He goes by many names: Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, David Robert Jones… yes, it’s David Bowie. This British musician, actor, and artist is known for his many metamorphoses and accomplishments, from his surprise hit single “Space Oddity” in 1969 to a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 11th Annual Webby Awards in 2011. In celebration of the new Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, we’ve pulled together a brief quiz from information in the Oxford Index on this eclectic artist who has also just released his first album in over a decade.
By Simon Macdonald
During the French Revolution many of the losers in the process of regime change found their property, including their private papers, snapped up by the new authorities. For historians, some of the richest pickings among this material relate to people whose lives, had they not collided with the revolutionary state, might otherwise have gone unrecorded. While exploring these archives a few years ago, I came across a remarkable cache confiscated from an Englishman who had been living in revolutionary Paris.