Artist of the Week: Hugo Max
Your room is full of giraffes, on birthday cards, figurines, blankets. They pop up in a lot of your recent work. Why giraffes? Where to begin with giraffes? There’s an old Jewish joke that giraffe meat would be kosher, but they don’t know where to cut the neck. Which, purely from a paint
Hide and Seek with the Brain
The brains of today remind me of hamsters on wheels: forever playing catch-up, running from one day into the next, set on rebuilding themselves. At times, stretching themselves awake in a baby, and later, spreading across the sky. There are two types of people who can teach you a great deal about th
The Curse of Wuthering Heights: A case study into why adaptations flop, and why directors can’t stay away.
Wuthering Heights has an element of the reverse Midas touch, in the sense that almost every director who touches the book ends up tarnishing it. It has been dubbed ‘The Unfilmable’, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Over twenty screen adaptations of the novel exist, including a 200-e
“Art, yeah? What’s it about?”: The Features team has a LARP
On May Day Eve, some Isis Writers headed to Tap Social, or Atik, or the Bullingdon, but Jules and Isaaq did not. Well, we did, but before our respective events, we decided to pop along to a Live Action Role Play event organised by Xsist Media in advance of Lucas Closs’ play Mitigating Circumstance
Westwood Ho! Or, the Oxford Fashion Gala 2023
It’s eight in the evening on 2 May: around thirty half-dressed, slightly less than half-made up models are huddled in a jumbled queue, slowly moving up the steps into Freud. The bouncers have just kicked everyone out of the venue in order to check their IDs (venue regulations halt for no 
Artist of the Week: Max Blansjaar
Flora Bigham interviews Max Blansjaar, a second-year music student at Catz. He has released two EPs with the Oxford-based label ‘Beanie Tapes’, described by Clash magazine as “deadpan, lo-fi pop tunes delivered with buzzsaw accuracy”. Hi Max! As a person and musician, how would you describe
Review: Gilgamesh All Night Epic
For her sixth and final lecture as Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald convened a nine-hour performance of The Epic of Gilgamesh, scheduled to begin at around 8 pm on Sunday 30th April and take the audience into May Day morning. My expectations for the number of attendees were reasonably low. It quick
‘Stock Till You Drop
There’s something a little carnivalesque about an Oxford college putting on a music festival. For a single day, Wadham takes Woodstock; straight-laced Oxford students become free spirits, transported away from Parks Road into a nostalgic reimagining of the summer of ‘69. It’s all quite
“Surely we made before we intellectualised?” A Conversation with Orsola de Castro
Designer, author and self-proclaimed “Original Granny” Orsola de Castro wants you to learn to repair your clothes. After founding ‘From Somewhere’, a luxury upcycling label that worked with Topshop and Speedo, Orsola started ‘Fashion Revolution,’ a global organisation campaigning fo