Academia
The decline of traditional university study is no bad thing
University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant…
A.N. Wilson has many regrets
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?
What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…
A study in vulnerability: The Coming Bad Days, by Sarah Bernstein, reviewed
When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…
A fantastic online show of Euripides's take on Helen of Troy
Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris,…
Why academics hold Thatcher and Trump in such contempt
‘Has that orange baboon gone yet?’ asked a senior professor in the teacher’s room at my university yesterday. The remark…
Universities are supposed to encourage debate, not strangle it
Liberal values are under attack on two flanks. Those of us who think extensive freedom of expression, universal human rights…
Hyperbole radicalism and the politics of exaggeration
‘All I want for Christmas is White genocide.’ So remarked George Ciccariello-Maher, then professor of politics and global studies at…
Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?
‘You can talk about anything you like,’ said Radu, a young Romanian academic when he invited me to a conference…
Why do so many academics write so badly?
Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as…
High life
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…
David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man
This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends…
Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
