The Looking Glass

NOAH BUCKLE   This essay won the 2020 edition of the New College of the Humanities English Essay Prize. “And thus a change of époque, which is a change of reader, is comparable to a change in the text itself…” ~ Paul Valéry Contemporary literary analysis, echoing D. A. Winstanley’s dictum that “nothing is more unfair than to judge the men [sic] of the past by the ideas of the present,” believes itself an extension of the juridico-political apparatus. Attempting to delineate precisely the aesthetic and moral bases on which we are to assess literature, then, has become a matter of justice; the collective distaste for ‘presentism’, we are informed, is (ironically) an expression of our civility and integrity. But it is also a matter of truth: “We should not,” maintain the ‘anti-presentists’, “judge past literature by the standards of the present, because the standards by which literature is judged ought to be objective.” The apparent modesty of those who would circumscribe criticism of...

JAMIE BARRETT In 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered stars that lie outside our own galaxy. This sparked new interest in astronomers, who since then have directed their telescopes past nearby stars and out towards much more distant objects. Many cosmological marvels have been found, such as the blue giant Icarus, which was identified in 2016 in a spiral galaxy around 5 billion light years away from Earth. However, despite nearly a century of discoveries, the process by which galaxies form is still missing many details. All science relies on data, and to understand the origins of galaxies, we need to study early galaxies. This may seem impossible, but the nature of light provides a helping hand. The speed of light means that the time taken to travel distances on a human scale may be negligible, but on a large scale, a single photon may take many hundreds or millions of years to travel through a galaxy, and even longer to reach us, carrying the same information as when the photons was first e...

The disparity between accounts of Alexander the Great by ancient authors has proved problematic in the attempt by modern scholars to piece together the facts surrounding his life and character. Yet this issue is exacerbated further with the presence of the Alexander Romance which is believed to have begun shortly after his death and progressed through to the Middle Ages. Within these romances, the weird and wonderful creep into some of the narratives of Alexander’s life, often shifting story telling from historical chronicles to outright fantasy. Yet whilst the study of romances is unhelpful when trying to establish the original Alexander, they are interesting insights into the culture and motives of those who wrote them. Indeed, the work of Charles Martindale has been hugely influential in this form of study, as he notes aptly that through the constant manipulation of source material and evidence, through a multitude of cultures and motives of each author, ‘we cannot get back to a...

SAKSHAM SIDANA Cue 1958. World War 2 has settled, peacetime has been restored, with the help of a computer less powerful than the smartphone we use today. Computing has so far seen significant advancements, from the Enigma machine all the way to ENIAC - the world’s first general-purpose computer. Groundbreaking as the ENIAC was, it involved huge numbers of discrete components laboriously connected to each other by over 17000 vacuum tubes(which transferred electrons from a heated cathode to an anode in a glass body). As a result, the computer occupied a whole room, notwithstanding the fact that the tubes were highly vulnerable to damage and required regular replacement. Consequently, the transistor was invented in 1947 - a piece that would act as ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches when given specific signals. Although this was an extraordinary breakthrough, it still didn’t solve the space problem. Components still had to be wired together individually, taking up time, and stopping digital systems ...

[Image credit Michael Willinger on pexels] JAMIE BARRETT A spider’s exoskeleton - a hard yet flexible armour made of chitin - doesn’t grow along with the arachnid. Up to a dozen times in the spider’s life, this covering is disposed of to allow for growth. After recyclable nutrients have been absorbed, a new exoskeleton is constructed and the spider pushes out of its old exoskeleton, completing the moulting process. Although the moulted skin is now of no use to the land-dwelling organism, it has certain properties that are perfect for countering a threat to sea life. A decade after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the environmental effects are still being felt. In June 2017, Craig McClain and his colleagues at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium surveyed the Gulf of Mexico and found that species like sea cucumbers, sponges, and giant isopods had disappeared from the site. Some creatures, such as the Atlantic deep sea red crab and Nematocarcinus red shrimp, were found in...

JAMIE BARRETT The online world can be a harsh place. Wars rage through packets and bits over matters from politics to puppy names. Everywhere you turn there seems to be someone with conflicting views. It may be easy to think that humankind harbours an integral aggression that leads such rows - or maybe no matter how kind we are, this is to be expected, and perhaps there is a way our kindness can still show through. Contentious threads on Twitter are a far cry from face-to-face conversations. Such passionate, continued arguments are rarely seen outside of those who are naturally argumentative and environments built specifically for intense debate. But threads on Twitter always begin with a single tweet, which could itself be the cause. Politics itself always leads to annual dinner-table arguments, and it is true that many heated discussions on and outside social media stem from political opinions. However, even innocent-sounding starting points - the colour of a dress, say - can fuel su...