Carola Binney

If you think capitalism has blinged up Christmas, you should see what the Communists are doing to it. At this time of year, Chinese cities are dressed up like one big Oxford Street, but with lights that put London’s in the shade. Christmas Eve has become the biggest shopping day of the year. At the school where I taught last year, every classroom had at least three Christmas trees: one outside the door, one inside the door and one at the back. Tinsel ran up staircases, fake snow adorned all the windows. The Chinese have even developed their own Christmas traditions: revellers give each other elaborately packaged apples, and Father Christmas is always pictured playing the saxophone.

If you think capitalism has blinged up Christmas, you should see what the Communists are doing to it. At this time of year, Chinese cities are dressed up like one big Oxford Street, but with lights that put London’s in the shade. Christmas Eve has become the biggest shopping day of the year. At the school where I taught last year, every classroom had at least three Christmas trees: one outside the door, one inside the door and one at the back. Tinsel ran up staircases, fake snow adorned all the windows. The Chinese have even developed their own Christmas traditions: revellers give each other elaborately packaged apples, and Father Christmas is always pictured playing the saxophone.

Why study history? It's a question which often gets asked, and the historian R. G. Collingwood's answer - that history should enable us to ‘see more clearly into the situation in which we are compelled to act’- is one of the best responses. The idea that the study of the past should be applicable to the present has directed the career of Niall Ferguson, who was recently bemoaning the degradation of the subject. Discussing the current focus on race, class and gender in history faculties in a recent speech, Ferguson argued that undergraduates are being robbed of the chance to study events of real significance.

Iranian human rights activist Maryam Namazie was harassed by members of the Goldsmiths University Islamic Society on Monday night, while speaking to the university’s Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society. Namazie, whose talk was about ‘Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of Isis’, has been branded an 'Islamophobe' by members of the Islamic Society for her criticism of political Islam and aspects of Islamic theology. Footage of the talk has been posted on YouTube, and makes for depressing viewing: a group of young men in the front row aggressively interrupt Namazie throughout, shouting 'Safe Space!' and one of them eventually unplugs the projector when a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed is displayed.

The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might - you guessed it - 'cause offence'. No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to 'promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express'. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group - the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators - which aspires to 'welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion'.

University towns are already awash with fur-trimmed gowns and proud parents, but behind the smiles there’s a glimmer of resentment: four in 10 of those graduating this year think they’ve been ripped-off. According to a survey of 1000 final-year students by ComRes, students are split over whether they think their degree was good value for money. One factor determining their verdict was their subject, with two-thirds of those studying science, technology, engineering and maths saying their course was worth the fees. Just 44 per cent of humanities and social science students agreed.

Ed Miliband wants the youth vote enough to have spent an evening with Russell Brand earlier this week. My generation could decide the election next Thursday, and politicians seem to think there are two ways to win young voters’ hearts: celebrity endorsement and self-interest. The battle for the youth vote has hinged around promising to save us money. Now they’re done bickering about tuition fees, the party leaders are busy telling students how we would personally benefit from their governments: Labour would ban unpaid internships, the Tories would help us buy our first homes and the Lib Dems would cut our bus fares by two-thirds. But when it comes to young voters, self-interest doesn’t sell: we want a vision for society.

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the facts.

On Sunday, Hartlepool FC quashed rumours that they would be signing Ched Evans, the former Sheffield United forward and convicted rapist. In response to the Hartlepool manager Ronnie Moore’s comment that 'if it could happen, I would want it to happen', the club released a statement saying that they would not be signing Evans, 'irrespective of his obvious ability as a football player'.  Following Sheffield United’s example, Hartlepool have been pressured by the public into administering vigilante justice to a man who has been deemed by our justice system to have served the appropriate amount of time for his crime.

As I wiggled into my tights in preparation for an end-of-term night out, I was faced with the perennial clubbing question: should I take a coat? Logic, and my mum, would say the answer was obvious. My outfit was hardly cosy, and a tipsy walk home at 2am in December is an adventure best braved from within my wardrobe’s most wind-proof, water-proof and fur-lined offering. But the question wasn’t just one of insulation – I had a financial decision to make. The cloakrooms at most Oxford clubs cost between one and two pounds: what did I want more, healthy circulation or a Jägerbomb?

An unpaid six month internship costs graduates at least £5,000, according to a study by The Sutton Trust. The social mobility charity has analysed interns’ expenditure on rent, food, transport and other bills while working for free, and found that the average half-year placement in London costs over £6,000. The figure for Manchester was only marginally less ruinous, at slightly over £5,000. While seven out of ten Britons now believe that unpaid internships are unfair because they make top graduate jobs the preserve of the rich, one third of interns don’t receive a wage. My year at Oxford are approaching our penultimate summer as undergraduates, and internships are the hot topic. Financial considerations are key: McKinsey and Co.