Free Republic

A historic pub in the centre of Oxford that has served students, scholars and literary greats for over 450 years is to close. The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic. It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private...

May 17, 2016 Abby Jackson Responding to criticism about dismal diversity metrics, Chris Patten, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, disparaged the concept of racial quotas, as Quartz reported. In an interview with The Telegraph, Patten said that quotas lower standards: I am in favor of universities recognizing their responsibilities for promoting social inclusion. But I don’t think that if you want high-class universities, you should expect them to lower their standards in order to make up for some inadequacies in our secondary education system. Nobody will explain to me how you can make a system of quotas work...

'The remora sucker is a truly amazing anatomical specialisation but, strange as it may seem, it evolved from a spiny fin,' said Dr Matt Friedman of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, lead author of the report. 'In this fossil the fin is clearly modified as a disc but is found on the back of the fish. It enables us to say that first fin spines on the back broadened to form wide segments of a suction disc. After the disc evolved, it migrated to the skull, and it was there that individual segments became divided in two, the number...