worked under a Government Youth Training Scheme. He then retook his O Levels and went to the Sixth Form of William Ellis School, Highgate, leaving with two Bs and a C at A Level. Having applied to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University, he had been given a conditional offer of three Bs plus an O Level pass in a foreign language from Brasenose College, under a scheme to provide university access to comprehensive pupils. Despite thus failing to achieve the offer, he was nevertheless awarded a place to study at the college. Young said he was sent an acceptance letter by mistake, as well as a letter of rejection from the admissions tutor Harry Judge. In an article he wrote for The Spectator, he said that his father phoned Judge to clarify the situation – Judge was in a meeting with the PPE tutors at the time, and after some discussion, they decided to offer Young a place owing to a moral obligation the mistaken acceptance created. Young graduated in 1986 with a first in PPE, and then worked for The Times for a six-month period as a news trainee until he was fired, for, according to Young himself, hacking the computer system, impersonating the editor Charles Wilson and circulating information about senior executives' salaries to others around the building. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at Harvard and spent a two-year period at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he carried out research for a PhD which he left before completing. Journalism, writing and activism In 1991, Young co-founded and co-edited the Modern Review with Julie Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman. Its motto was "Low culture for highbrows". "The whole enterprise was driven by one fairly simple idea", Young said in 2005. "And that was that critics had a responsibility to take the best popular culture as seriously as the best high culture". Four years later the magazine was close to financial collapse and Young closed it down, angering his principal financial backer Peter York, as well as Burchill and staff writer Charlotte Raven. Burchill had tried to replace Young as editor with Raven. "Ultimately the reason we fell out is because our relationship began as a kind of mentor-apprentice, and that was a kind of relationship which Julie was comfortable with. It was only when I succeeded in getting out from under