“Is literature a lamp, a microscope or an x-ray?” It surprised me to come across such an unusual and innate question amongst old English papers while studying for my mock exams last year. While I thought that I would never risk answering such a question, even now it still lingers in my mind, perhaps due to the way it reflects my own enthusiasm for literature, for I believe that literature has a unique ability to open us up to ideas...

I applied to King's College, Cambridge, and my interview was comprised of three parts. The first part was a mock class. We were sent the Coleridge poem 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison' as well as a collection of 8 of Shakespeare's sonnets (Sonnets number 18, 29, 34, 35, 71, 87, 116 & 129) ahead of time. We were then asked to discuss them with other interviewees in a group of five or six, as though we were in a Cambridge supervision, while the interviewer sat and observed - they didn't participate at all. Initially I thought that this part of the interview would be cut-throat and that it would...