British Education may be the envy of the world - but also, to large parts of the world, also unreachable - at least at England's most elite universities. According to the Guardian today, at Cambridge, "of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff none are black." Italics mine. Yes, that's right. And then you wonder why American has Obama, and we have Clegg and Cameron. Then turn to the student access statistics, and some Oxford colleges haven't accepted a single black student in: 5 years. This is why raising tuition fees to £9,000 a year will not benefit the many, but only the few - even now the system benefits the few. It can only get worse...
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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When I was at Oxford in the 1970s there were quite a few black students around. Things seem to have deteriorated since then.
Best wishes from Simon