Ruth Scurr: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why? It’s the way the river goes through the center of the city, for me. Water is very important to me. It’s the way the colleges back onto the river. There are many — my college, for example, is divided by the river, so we have some on one side, some on the other. I think at a certain level, it reminds me of Paris a little bit. Whereas Oxford — you have to go slightly hunting: it’s there, of course, but it seems more peripheral to the city. The city seems closer to London — the other thing that’s interesting is in Cambridge, the colleges house all of their students, even our graduate students. We have a lot of investment in doing that. Whereas in Oxford, they don’t, not even their undergraduates. And that means that there is a huge market in basic landlords who are making money out of the students. They are housing them in very, very shabby accommodation. It’s really run down, lots of Oxford, even quite central Oxford, for this reason. I think that does make a big difference. I think the colleges and their approach to looking after the housing of the undergraduates in Cambridge is actually a big contribution here. Now, you’ve reviewed a great deal for the Times Literary Supplement. We live in an internet-driven world, and although there’s online TLS, it doesn’t actually circulate that much. The links are not always open. How would you articulate how and why the TLS remains important today?…

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