Echo
“Echo” was the winner of The Isis’ ‘500 Words’ competition in Michaelmas 2019. Judge Julian Barnes called it ‘kaleidoscopic’ and the entry which stayed “longest and most intriguingly in the memory”. Ronnie Angel Pope, author of “Echo”, is a student at Universität Basel and Car
Oxford joins the UCU strikes
Large crowds gather outside the Clarendon building on a cold Broad Street, sporting heavy coats and bold slogans. These are protesters, clustered in the rain to kick off eight days of strike action over the pay and teaching conditions of academic staff. Nationwide, sixty universities are participati
Frenzy Playlist
To be in a state of frenzy is to experience an extreme sense of disorientation, to struggle with a confused whirlwind of emotions, or simply to feel the unadulterated joy that can come with the unknown. This playlist hopes to capture these feelings alongside this term’s edition of The Isis. Fr
The Changing Face of Poetry
Mukahang Limbu is explaining to me why he writes poetry. “It can make you feel like you’re being heard. Coming from a marginalised background, and not having much representation in the literary canon, that can make you feel invisible. But being able to write yourself into that canon is reall
Manchester, the Met, and #MeToo
Just as #MeToo was gaining mainstream attention in late 2017, a petition was launched to remove one of Balthus’ most iconic portraits. The painting, Thérèse Dreaming (1938), depicts a young girl sitting with her underwear and groin area deliberately exposed. Her white underwear contrasts with th
China’s Third Way
Shenzhen, the fourth largest city on the Chinese mainland, and one of the largest cities in the world, is contemporary China at its most bizarre and contradictory. Straddling the border with Hong Kong, and part of the broader geographic and economic region known as the Pearl River Delta, Shenzhen is
Funding Under Fire
Walking out of Oxford train station, the first building you see is a sleek three-storey structure, its polished modernity incongruous with its modest surroundings. The Saïd Business School, built in 2001, oversees teaching for Oxford University students in business, management, and finance. Only th
Placebo
A book belonging to Alexander Smoakes was open on the table, and he was staring at a word he didn’t know. Smoakes became angry, the seeping kind. He did not feel himself getting angry, but became it, because this was the kind of seeping anger you cannot notice in yourself at all. It bit at [&h