Simon-heffer
Simon Heffer

Oxford Debate: You Ask the Questions

Simon Heffer, Marina Purkiss, Zoe Strimpel and Adele Walton chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Thursday, 3 April 2025

12:00pm

I hour 15 minutes

Sheldonian Theatre

£8 - £20

Join our panel of leading political and media figures, Professor Simon Heffer, Marina Purkiss, Zoe Strimpel and Adele Walton, for lively debate on topics of the day, chaired by Yasmin Alibhai Brown. Ticketholders are invited to email questions before the event, and Yasmin will pick a representative range for audience members to ask.

Heffer is a journalist and historian. He is a professor of modern British history at the University of Buckingham. He works for The Daily Telegraph and has a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. His most recent book, Scarcely English, An A-Z Of Assaults on Our Language, details the modern horrors of bad English.

Purkiss is a political commentator and campaigner. She features on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine Show, Good Morning Britain, This Morning, LBC, BBC radio, Sky News and Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, and has her own ‘politically charged (but fun)’ podcast, The Trawl.

Strimpel is an author, historian and journalist who specialises in gender, relationships and sexuality. She has published three books, her most recent being Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘the Single’. She writes regularly for both The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. Her next book is about why money, sex and power are, after all, and always have been, good for women.

Walton is a British-Turkish journalist and the author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World. Walton has channelled a personal loss into campaigning for a safer digital world. She regularly works with parliamentarians and policy-makers, bereaved families and parents and fellow tech justice campaigners and activists to make the digital world safer for young people.

The panel is chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a journalist and author who has written extensively on issues of diversity and social justice. Her books include In Defence of Political Correctness, Refusing the Veil and Exotic England: The Making of a Curious Nation.

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