10-05-2025
Obnoxious Oxford — a wickedly funny satire about privileged students
In the Oxford novel, if such a thing exists, a middle-class young man is assigned a new personality by a louchely aristocratic old Etonian. Brideshead Revisited is the unvanquished classic of the genre. A recent twist on this is the film Saltburn. There the young man is allowed, subversively, to invent his own personality — gritty Scouser — so that he seems exotic to the aristocrat Felix.
But in the Oxford of the 2020s things have changed: regional accents are out and tenuously claimed BAME identities are in — according to Thomas Peermohamed Lambert's debut novel, Shibboleth. Now it's preferable to be 'three-sixteenths Ottoman' or 'a real, honest to God, Palestinian' than prolier-than-thou from Merseyside.
The Oxford novel, so concerned with made-up identities,
