Day Return to Oxford

49 years ago, in the glorious summer of 1976, I was lucky enough to persuade ATV, then the ITV company for the Midlands, to let me go back to my old Oxford college, New College, to make a film about how things had changed since I had left eight years before. The result was a programme called 'Day Return to Oxford' which can now be viewed online thanks to MACE, the Media Archive of Central London. This is the link https://www.macearchive.org/films/day-return-oxford

One of the big changes the film focuses on is the admission of women to what had been, in my day, exclusively male colleges, and one of the interviewees is the first female cox of Brasenose College's rowing eight. Then there is New College undergraduate (student) Miles Young, talking about his sadness at leaving Oxford and about how hard it was to find a good job. After a distinguished career in advertising, he would go on to become Warden (i.e. boss) of New College. There is also a veteran 'scout' (college servant) giving the lowdown on what is was like cleaning up after privileged young men, and the head of the careers service discussing the challenge of finding Oxford graduates the job of their dreams.

Other vexed questions tackled included: how much work did undergraduates do, and what was it like for young men and women to be in a university where the sex ratio was still about four men to every woman. But because the weather was so wonderful, the real star of the film was Oxford itself.

Coups d’état; what is the chance of succeeding?

Last month’s coup d’état against Turkey’s President Erdogan failed, but between 1950 and 2010, on average a coup had a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the University of Kentucky examined 450 from that 60 year period, and found that 227 – 49.7% – were successful. And the plotters seemed to be improving, because those mounted since 2003 had a 70% success rate.

But coups have become less common. Their heyday was the 1960s, when there were about 15 a year. By the first decade of the new millennium that was down to 5 a year. One reason may be that the world is getting richer. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University found that if people’s average incomes doubled, the risk of a coup fell by more than a quarter.

As to the ingredients of a successful coup, there seems a fair degree of consensus – detain key leaders, take over key media outlets, control key transport arteries. The Turkish plotters failed to  implement these properly, but perhaps a new factor was at play – social media, which President Erdogan used very effectively to rally support.

Landslides more deadly than realised

According to a study by Durham University in the UK, landslides kill up to ten times as many people as we thought.    Its authors said the worldwide death toll from 2004 to 2010 was 32,300, compared with earlier estimates of between 3,000 and 7,000.

The main author, David Petley, said most data tended to record only landslides in which ten or more people are killed, when many victims perish in much smaller events. 

The study identified the most vulnerable regions as being countries along the Himalayan Arc - India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh - plus China, and Central and South America.  It suggested that better management of forests and discouraging people from living in vulnerable areas were the best way of reducing the danger.

Perhaps the world’s deadliest landslide was the one that hit coastal areas of Venezuela after torrential rain in the last few days of the twentieth century.   Estimates of the number killed range as high as 30,000.   For the full story see A Disastrous History of the World.