A specialist consultancy providing bespoke advice and creative solutions for complex cultural, ethical, and religious issues in contemporary geopolitics.
Oxford House Research publishes weekly briefing papers on topical and global issues authored by associates and a range of external contributors. Members receive these by email each week.
As my wife and I prepare for our summer break (this is the last Briefing until September), we have been looking back on the year. We both have elderly mothers, who make demands but remind us of ultimate realities. We have four fine grandchildren, who bring delight but intensify our concerns about the future. We […]
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Overshadowed internationally by the crisis in Ukraine, torn domestically between the Scylla of conflict over Taiwan and the Charybdis of ethnic regionalism in Xinjiang, and buffeted, as we saw in Part I, by waves of domestic discontent, Xi Jinping’s ‘New China’ faces the greatest challenges to its identity and coherence since its inception in 1949. […]
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I am one of a number of optimistic China-watchers who believed in its potential to be a force for good in the world. Alas, its failure to fulfil this expectation has become a modern tragedy. In retrospect, China’s current trajectory should come as no surprise. Despite reporting to the contrary, its breakneck economic growth concealed […]
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Like many Western societies, the UK prides itself on being tolerant. Fundamental British values are now widely promoted as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, respect and tolerance. Not to be tolerant is to many, we are led to believe, to be narrow-minded, bigoted, exclusive, and potentially a lawbreaker. It is to be castigated […]
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In my last OH Briefing (‘Sport, glorious sport’, 15 January 2022), I alluded to the close relationship between sporting achievement and character, how mindset, discipline and will are the bedrock of greatness in champions. As a friend quoted to me the other day, ‘It’s discipline that turns a nobody into a somebody.’ I want to […]
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I am delighted Duncan Smith[1] responded positively to my request to write a Guest Briefing for Oxford House. The Briefing is a taster of his treatment of an important theme. Christopher Hancock (Director) Frauds and tricksters are common in fiction. From the Wizard of Oz to The Talented Mr Ripley fictional characters have portrayed the […]
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Nearly thirty years ago, I wrote an essay – long since lost in our attic or garage – for a competition run by the Economist, on the importance of smallholder farming for food security, economic growth and jobs. Needless to say, my essay didn’t win a prize (!), but writing it helped instil in me […]
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It is very hard to talk about some things. Pain, complexity, tragedy, and mystery often leave us lost for words – or should do. Words walk heavily on new graves and traumatized souls. I still remember with gratitude and respect the words of a senior Cambridge colleague on hearing my grandmother had died, ‘If there […]
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On 1 June 2021, The Times correspondent Tom Parfitt reported on a portrait of President Vladimir Putin (b. 1952; Pres. 1999-2000, 2000-2008, 2012-present) by the Russian artist Yevgeniya Khaybullina. The portrait is striking. It is constructed out of five hundred teeth (some false!) the artist had collected from a dentist in her hometown of Ufa, […]
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When it was released in 1990, critics panned Brian de Palma’s (b. 1940) film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). The public agreed. Despite its best-selling literary source, satirical humour, and star-studded cast (including Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall and Morgan Freeman), the film was a commercial […]
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