A new secondhand bookstore opened in Oxford city centre last week. Located in the Golden Cross shopping centre, just off Cornmarket Street, the bookstore stocks hundreds of secondhand books, ranging from accessibly priced paperbacks to rare and expensive antiquarian first-editions. It was previously home to dessert cafe Fluffy Fluffy, and before that, it was an optician’s.

Its four co-directors, Helen Flatley, Mehdi Bensenane, Scott Moynihan, and Sumner Braund, who have backgrounds in medieval history and philosophy, opened the store in order to provide a boost to secondhand bookselling in Oxford. Helen, a medievalist and history lecturer at the University of Oxford as well as co-director of the store, said: “Some of us did our PhDs here and have been thinking for quite a while that Oxford needs more secondhand bookshops, so that was the inspiration for it.”

“Effectively, we’ve built the kind of bookshop we ourselves would like to go to”, Helen told Cherwell. The store stocks a wide range of genres, including ancient philosophy, medieval and modern history, and fiction. Its site dates from 1496 and is thought to have links to Shakespeare. According to the store’s Instagram page, the bard is rumoured to have stayed in the building in the seventeenth century, when it was a coaching inn. He is also rumoured to have put on a production of Hamlet in the Golden Cross courtyard. The courtyard itself is one of the oldest parts of medieval Oxford, dating back to the thirteenth century, Helen explained.

The owners said they have been delighted with the response they’ve had since opening the store in May, especially from students. “We’ve been especially heartened by the amount of students that have been in”, Helen told Cherwell. The store aims to cater to students’ needs both in terms of stock and prices. Helen said: “It’s one of the things that we thought would be important, to have a range of prices, so we have many books that are accessibly priced, as well as some more rare and expensive things.”

Some of the store’s most noteworthy antiquarian books include a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s 1984, priced at £1000, and a 1863 copy of George Eliot’s Romola, priced at £200. The store also stocks some early illustrated editions of Shakespeare. The owners hope to expand the antiquarian side of the business, Helen told Cherwell.

As well as catering to students’ needs, the owners hope the store will provide tourists with a special insight into Oxford. Mehdi Bensenane, a philosopher originally from Paris, said: “When people come to Oxford, they do not go to Disney World or Paris or London, they come here for a reason. They are interested in the history of the place, in the humanities, and in the sciences.

“But Oxford can be rather opaque when you think about it from a tourist’s point of view. Buildings are defined not so much by what they do but who was their benefactor – Ashmolean, Bodleian. Colleges can be hard to access, too, as you have to pay to look around. So we wanted to create that Oxford feel, but with an open door. We’re hoping to create a network and a feeling of community for independent bookshops, whilst addressing the expectations of local communities and tourists.”

A number of Oxford’s independent shops have been threatened with closure recently. Riverman Records, a second-hand record shop and music store on Walton Street with a cult following, is facing an uncertain future as its landlord has submitted a planning application to turn the premises into living accommodation. Oxford’s longest-running independent cinema, The Ultimate Picture Palace in Cowley, is also facing the prospect of closing after its landlord, Oriel College, refused to extend its lease in order to allow vital investments and renovations.

Blackwell’s on Broad Street used to run a thriving secondhand and antiquarian books section, but has scaled down its operation in recent years. In addition, the future of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles’s Street has recently been thrown into doubt after Regent’s Park College, which owns the premises, submitted a planning application to turn the premises into an MCR. The application was rejected by Oxford City Council, and Regent’s Park has said that it is considering its options.

President of New College JCR Harry Aldridge was removed from office late last night in a motion of no-confidence.

The motion received 115 votes in favour, with 71 JCR members voting to keep Aldridge as President and 15 abstaining, out of a total of 421 New College undergraduates. The vote came just four weeks before the end of Aldridge’s last term as JCR President after eight months in the role.

The motion, brought to a JCR meeting on Saturday evening by third-year undergraduate Jacob Newby, accused Aldridge of holding “too many officerships across a multiplicity of university societies”, and prioritising “Oxford Union and Labour Club elections over the JCR”. According to the motion, this led to a “widespread view amongst members of the JCR…that the President has failed to live up to standards expected of the leader of the JCR, and indeed the standards of recent Presidents”. The motion claimed that Aldridge had failed to implement any manifesto pledges, and noted vacancies in the JCR’s Vice-Presidential positions. 

During his term as JCR President, Aldridge has held several senior student society positions, including President of the 93% Club, Co-Chair of the Oxford Labour Club, Associate Editor of The Oxford Student, President of Media Society, Secretary of the Oxford Union and Oxford Union Librarian-Elect. At the same JCR meeting, Aldridge proposed an amendment to the JCR Standing Orders to “bar JCR Officers from Holding Concurrent Positions in the Oxford Union”, a motion seconded by Newby. This motion was approved overwhelmingly by JCR members, with 149 votes in favour and 28 against.

In emails sent to JCR members before and during the poll, Aldridge acknowledged that “many people feel the JCR has not operated to the best possible standard this year” and “there were periods when communication was not good enough”. He noted that “it is important that I acknowledge publicly that mistakes were made”, but said he hoped to have met “the vast majority” of his manifesto pledges by the end of his term. He described serving as JCR President as “the greatest privilege” of his time in Oxford, and said he was “incredibly grateful to everyone who placed their trust in me at the start of the year”.

Defending his record, Aldridge told JCR members: “I have never missed a JCR meeting, have consistently made myself available to students and have tried to approach the role with energy and genuine care for the community”. He noted progress on accommodation rent negotiations, changes to the JCR website and progress towards free printing for finalists, and urged members to consider the need for “a proper handover to the incoming committee”. 

Following the result, Aldridge told Cherwell he was “deeply upset” by the outcome of the vote but “incredibly grateful” to students who had supported him during his presidency. He added that he was saddened that “the college will now lose the opportunity for a proper end-of-term handover and the completion of several ongoing projects”.

Aldridge also criticised the way the no-confidence process had unfolded. He told Cherwell that, following earlier discussions with the original proposers of the motion, he had believed concerns about his presidency had been resolved, and described the motion being “unexpectedly revived” at the JCR meeting on Saturday evening as “a genuine shock”. He also alleged that “the atmosphere surrounding the vote became increasingly personal and politically hostile”, and said he had received “anonymous abusive messages”, including some “genuinely threatening in nature”.

An unsuccessful no-confidence motion was brought against University College JCR President Robert Mylne held earlier this term, but successful no-confidence motions are rare. In 2023, the Magdalen College JCR President was forced to resign following several resignations of committee members, but avoided a no-confidence motion. 

According to the JCR Standing Orders, if the position of President becomes vacant, the Vice-President for Welfare and Equality will perform the duties of President until a by-election is held. Announcing the results by email to New College undergraduates, the JCR Secretary said more information would be given “in the coming days” to outline the details of a by-election for the position of President for the remainder of Trinity Term. According to the Standing Orders, Aldridge would be eligible to run in any by-election for the position of President. 

First-year undergraduate Paarth Goswami was elected New College JCR President for the 2026-2027 academic year earlier this month.

The 2025-2026 Sheldonian Series ended on Wednesday 20th May with a panel discussion on the power, use, and limits of political satire. Held in the Sheldonian Theatre, the event brought together leading figures from British comedy and public commentary to reflect on satire’s role in the current political moment.

The Sheldonian Series, launched last academic year by the Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey, aims to “promote discussions about the big issues of the day”. This year’s theme focused on different dimensions of power. In Michaelmas term, the series examined the power of speech through debates around “cancel culture”, while Hilary Term’s discussion focused on activism and protest movements. 

Opening the evening in a pre-recorded video message, Tracey described the series as a “powerful reminder of what we stand for as a university community” and “what inclusive inquiry and freedom of speech should look like”. Professor William Whyte, the panel moderator, noted that the Sheldonian itself was “an ideal place” to discuss satire because it had effectively been “built for that very purpose”. It was built in the mid-17th century to provide a location for the ‘Oxford Act’, an often disastrous end-of-term event which gave students the chance to poke fun at the University and its members in a satirical oration.

The panel featured three prominent figures in the world of British political satire. It included Jan Ravens, an impressionist known for her work on Spitting Image and Dead Ringers, who performed multiple impressions throughout the course of the evening. Alongside her sat Andrew Hunter Murray, a Keble College alumnus turned Private Eye journalist and star of Radio 4’s The Naked Week. Completing the line-up was Ella Baron, cartoonist for the Guardian, who started her career drawing for Cherwell as an undergraduate at Merton College.

Three broad themes dominated the discussion. The first was satire’s ability to reshape how audiences see political events. Baron argued that cartoons can “collapse time and space”, creating the “click feeling” where an idea suddenly binds together in a reader’s mind, while Hunter Murray described satire as an attempt to “distil” reality into something surprising and funny, categorising his work on The Naked Week as an attempt to “express reality” in a surprising manner. Baron also argued that cartoons often work because viewers “see a cartoon before you even get to read the argument”, giving satire a unique immediacy within the modern news cycle.

A second theme was the question of whom satire should target. Baron argued that satire should involve “punching up but in all directions”, though she also warned that “if we think about punching up as redistribution of power, we can also think about those being crushed by it”. Hunter Murray similarly described “groupthink” as “the big enemy”. 

He also expressed awareness of the often intensely personal character of the work they produce, admitting that he has had sleepless nights after The Naked Week airs, worrying they had taken it too far. Ravens reflected on this process of deciding “how far can I go?” when creating satirical impressions, particularly when dealing with recognisable public figures. Together, the panellists repeatedly defended satire’s ability to offend and discomfort audiences, though they also acknowledged the ethical tensions involved. Baron reflected on receiving death threats for some of her work, while Ravens stressed the importance of being “intensely considerate” and not producing satire “thoughtlessly”. She also stressed, however, that satirists “need to be able to offend” and “can’t be too soft”.

The final major theme concerned whether satire remains effective in an era shaped by social media, political extremity, and artificial intelligence. Asked by the audience whether modern politics has become “beyond satire”, Hunter Murray argues that satire simply adapts to the culture around it, while Baron suggested that figures such as Donald Trump may be difficult to caricature, as there’s “not a lot of headroom”, but remain open to satire. The panel also reflected on the threat of AI to their practice, with Ravens arguing that AI-generated comedy doesn’t have “any humanity… any warmth… any humour”. 

The event culminated with a satirical performance by student comedian Foo, a DPhil student in Management. Foo delivered a presentation on “AI and your satire workflow” delivered in the character of “pre-McKinsey” Brasenose graduate “Jonty”.