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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2023
A Young Woman warms her back against a fire. It’s been burning in the besieged public space long enough to have partially ashed down; low flames and embers set the silhouetted sleeve of her leather jacket aglow. Charred poles from makeshift placards, sacrificed for heat, protrude at angles from the edges of the pyre, together with thicker timber of uncertain origin. The woman is fashionable, striking even with that long, oat-coloured scarf looped confidently around her neck. In the deeper field, a melee of other young people: a kneeling figure among them clutches a placard that says, simply, ‘NO’. The woman’s face is tilted upwards, her eyes raised. She’s smiling. Something in her expression, her relation to the fire, makes me think of Shelley’s thoughts on poetic inspiration: ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness’.
Flicking a few thumbnails along in this gallery of images from today’s student demonstrations against higher tuition fees, I suddenly realize what it is she’s staring at. In the confusion, a group of protesters have slipped up onto the roof of Millbank Tower, government campaign headquarters. They stare down, giving the two-finger peace symbol. One of them brandishes a stick. Other photos in the sequence show boots making cobwebs of plate-glass lobby windows, as well as graffitied walls and upturned office chairs left after members of the 50,000-strong crowd pushed back riot police to storm the building.
These are signs of our times.
Who could disagree that now is an interesting moment to be a creative writer in the academy? Universities have been the focus of intense public scrutiny leading up to the publication of the Browne Report on 10 October 2010. As well as proposing a radical restructuring of tuition fees, the report recommended that science, medicine and engineering should be prioritized as essential to the nation’s well-being, while teaching grants to ‘non-priority’ subjects – of which creative writing is one – could be reduced by up to one hundred per cent. Not for Browne, then, Shelley’s belief that:
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