I spent the first four months of 2026 writing a book about things I liked. But on May 12th I had a “knee replacement”; even if it goes well you are in a lot of pain for quite a long time and deeply frustrated. So here I am, approaching my eightieth birthday and feeling like […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
Can a colleague have intolerable opinions?
On the twenty seventh of March this year I attended the funeral of Jack Scarisbrick who had died at the age of ninety seven. It was very grand and very catholic: a full church, a requiem mass, a dozen priests, a cardinal (Vincent Nicholls), some Latin and some incense. There were many family members – […]
Steve Lamb
I am going to write about Steve Lamb the cricketer and I apologise to anyone reading or listening to this who doesn’t understand cricket or finds it boring, but Steve the cricketer was in many ways the key to Steve the person. I played cricket for more than forty years with Steve. He was an […]
How Blessed are the Peacemakers?
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 is being awarded to the Venezuelan politician Maria Cosina Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gives reasons for its decisions and their justification of the award says that she is “ . . . one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”. She […]
Super Trouper
I am ten years old and I know the difference between the literal and the metaphorical. But the woman I’m looking at does not. Metaphorically, she has blood on her hands, but she thinks it is literal. She’s screaming at her hands. She’s gone bonkers: I can see them clearly and they are completely clean. […]
The Dissolution of the Universities
In 1992 the university system in the United Kingdom was on the brink of a massive expansion which over the next two decades turned out to be even greater than anticipated. I was opposed to this expansion believing it to be bad for the universities and for society in general. I kept bumping into the […]
Why not enhance your games?
In most human activity we accept what is often called “the performance principle): the better, the better so to speak. It’s better to run a hundred metres in nine seconds than in ten. There is no good reason to exclude drugs which enhance performance from this principle and for the most part we don’t exclude […]
The Rise and Fall of Toleration
(John Locke’s 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration” considered from the perspective of 2025.) The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the Thirty Years’ War is generally to be considered by many political scientists in our own times to be an important step in the creation of the modern state because it allowed for the abandonment […]
Academic “leadership” – what’s all that about?
A distinguished academic leader remarked to me that there was more rubbish talked about leadership than any other subject. I can’t agree completely, bearing in mind the kinds of nonsense talked about wine and art, for example, but there is an important point. The answers to the question of what makes a good leader are […]
There’s writing – and there’s academic writing
All my adult life I have written both for academic journals and for more popular outlets like newspapers and magazines. Generally speaking the former do not pay, the latter do. I started with the British Journal of Political Science in 1971 and received my first cheque from The Countryman in 1972. Academic writing meant to […]