OXFORD REVIEW 
of BOOKS

Professor Nigel Biggar CBE answers questions from the ORB

Finding yourself aboard the Taipei metro, a voice over the tannoy states the station towards which you are heading in clear-cut Mandarin.

In the last twenty years, big budget studio cinema has begun to account for most global box office sales.

Novels about work have become ubiquitous.

Paris was tense on election day. Just outside a polling centre in in Le Marais voters tore down photos of incumbent president Macron.

'Criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood’.

Rushdie and Shatz merge in their interest in cosmopolitanism and exile, in the fact of finding oneself between identities...

'Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are’.

'Do you suppose any mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly?’

Staging grief is a delicate balancing act.

And where was the blood found, exactly?’ ‘Well that’s the thing, right. Everywhere, in a way.’

‘We expect extinction after people arrive on an island…survival is the exception.’

Truths needn’t always depend upon facts for their expression’. So says Tom Crewe, in the Afterword to The New Life.

‘We paint our toenails red, though we put shoes on our feet so no one will see our flashy toes.'

The late sociologist Bruno Latour and his collaborator Nikolaj Schultz are at the forefront of a newly conceptualised ecological battle.

Abrus precatorius is a flowering plant native to Asia, whose cheery, Christmas-red seeds also contain the lethal substance abrin.

For me, every new year begins with an all-day hike.

Walter Benjamin is often perceived as a puzzle to be solved.

Love poetry is a risky business. Maggie Millner in her debut Couplets: A Love Story (2023) seems all too aware of this.

ELEANOR CLARK and RACHEL REES - An interview with Tom Crewe