College Record 2014

That is the broad sweep of our College life in 2013-14. But I want to mention also
three individual achievements. First, that of Jon Stallworthy, who in this year of
commemoration of the outbreak of the Great War is having a great flowering of
publishing: new editions of his prize-winning biography of Wilfred Owen and a
two-volume edition of Owen’s Complete Poems, soon to be followed by the New
Oxford Book of War Poems and by his own collection, War Poet. It is our great
good fortune that this distinguished poet, author and editor, continues to play such
an active and dedicated part in the life of the College, and we thank him for it.
Secondly, one of our Common Room members, Stephanie Dalley, had an enormous
success with her book and her Channel 4 programme on the Hanging Garden of
Babylon, which transformed everyone’s previous assumptions about the location
of one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Thirdly, we were all entertained and
fascinated by Bryan Sykes’s three-part Channel 4 series ‘The BigFoot Files’, soon
to be revisited in his book, The Yeti Enigma. Bryan’s quest for the Yeti adds to the
storehouse of larger-than-life, adventurous and often eccentric, legendary figures
on which Wolfson’s history thrives.
The story of Wolfson College is still unfolding and always changing; I count myself
fortunate to be part of this history, and I am immensely grateful to all of those who
work, in all their different ways, for the College’s present life and its future legacy.
24