Harry Mount is a barrister, editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury).
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Ancient Greek, once central to a western European education, is on life support. Last summer, 206 pupils sat an A-level in ancient Greek. Of those, only a handful were state-educated. So it’s farewell to the language taught in our schools since the 16th century. Farewell to the language of the New Testament; the language Roman
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And so, slowly but regularly, the BBC loses touch with British national life. The BBC has just lost the radio broadcast rights to the Oxford vs. Cambridge Boat Race to Times Radio, which will cover the event for three years. It comes after Channel 4 won the deal last year for TV rights for the
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When the cops came calling to arrest Peter Mandelson this week, he was already lawyered up. And he’s secured the services of the best – and most expensive – lawyers in town. Mandelson is now staring down the barrel of a legal bill running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds – very possibly the millions, given the mammoth number of documents
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Here comes yet another blow to the rigour of Oxford’s entrance exams. Last December, they got rid of the in-person interview, replaced by less discerning Zoom interviews. And now the university has dropped lots of its subject-specific exams, to be replaced by more generic tests. There will still be some tailoring to particular degrees. Humanities
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This week, there’s a strange absence in Oxford. For years, in December, you’d suddenly see a strange invasion of the streets of the university town. White-faced, terrified 17-and 18-year-olds, preparing for their university interviews. Colleges, tea rooms and restaurants were haunted by these poor, clever souls, mumbling equations and gerundives to themselves. Well, no more.
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What’s the quickest way to make the two most famous universities in the world go wrong? Make it easier to get in. That’s exactly what Oxford and Cambridge appear to have done in recent years. And so – no surprise – it’s just been announced that neither university was in the top three British universities for the
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In the strange, arcane world of school mottoes, it’s fitting that the most famous one of all belongs to a fictional school. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ – is the motto of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. J.K. Rowling brilliantly realised that children aren’t put off by boarding
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Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the
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Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years,
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These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick
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In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100
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When I was at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early 1990s, I’d often read ‘Bogsheets’ in the loos by the college bar. They were single pages of anonymous college gossip, cheaply printed off in those pre-internet days. I remember one bogsheet clearly. The headline said, ‘Cheer up!’ And the standfirst said, ‘You’re at the most
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Why do the cool die young? I don’t mean famous, cool people like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. They are members of the 27 Club – the pop stars who died at 27. I mean the schoolboy gods of my youth, the marvellous-looking, self-assured ones, effortlessly going out with the prettiest girls. And now seven
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43 min listen
This week: Wild Wes. Ahead of next week’s vote on whether to legalise assisted dying, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is causing trouble for Keir Starmer, writes Katy Balls in the magazine this week. Starmer has been clear that he doesn’t want government ministers to be too outspoken on the issue ahead of a free vote
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If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… in Dulwich Wood – a charming fragment of the medieval Great North Wood in south London – the self-dubbed ‘Penis Gang’ have been at work. The gang have been daubing huge penises, in red, black and green, on ancient tree trunks
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In ‘Church Going’, the poem that gives this charming book its title, Philip Larkin talks about ‘one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were… Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. Well, Andrew Ziminski is king of the ruin-bibbers, randy for antique churches. He doesn’t just know what a rood-loft is; he’s
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Writer Guy Stagg threw in his job to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome – choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up only by his rucksack. On this
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Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage
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Just like the Anglo-Saxons disastrously paying off the Viking marauders with Danegeld, so the National Trust has attempted to do the same with its desperate virtue-signalling. For the last decade, the Trust has fallen on its knees in deference to every fashionable cause. But, again like the Anglo-Saxons with the Vikings, they can never do
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What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly. You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the
