Take a look at the All Souls College website and the list of questions for its General Paper - What are the functions of fashion? Why doesn't Britain have a café culture? Has morality made progress? – which read like a sort of brief, epigrammatic poetry.
In this week's Guardian Review, Will Self, Mary Midgeley, Geoff Dyer and Mary Beard all have a stab at answering the questions. If you could set the questions for what's claimed to be one of the hardest exams in the world, what would you ask?