When I was a visiting academic at Stanford in the mid-1970s the game of laureate spotting was a common practice. I don’t know how many Nobel prizewinners were then on the campus – the claim now is twenty one – but there were plenty about. The biggest spot was Linus Pauling and I always […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
The Venal and the Ascetic in Academic life
In 2014 a former colleague of mine resigned his job as the vice-chancellor of an Australian university. He didn’t have a lot of choice as he had been suspended by the Senate of the university and reported to the Crime and Corruption Commission. Many people were baffled and intrigued by the events, scanning the […]
Poor Little Orphan Austria
We were sitting in a common room in 1968 worrying and commiserating with a visiting Czech academic as it appeared increasingly likely that the Soviet Union would intervene to oust the liberalising government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. There were practical and urgent things to worry about, but the talk turned to the long […]
Conservatism and Sport
The suffix “ism” has two distinct implications, though they may be combined. The first is doctrinal: “marxists” are defined by beliefs, propositions derived from the thought of Karl Marx, even though the meaning and relative importance of those propositions is likely to be interpreted diversely and contested. The second implication suggests tendencies of attitude and […]
Trump and Corbyn: different chaps, same phenomenon
Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are in obvious ways opposites: in the over-used terminology we learned from France’s revolutionary National Assembly in the 1790s one is at the extreme “left” of orthodox politics in the anglophone world and the other at a version of the extreme “right”. But they also have similarities. They have […]
Central Europe
Thoughts in Flanders Fields
The Flemish town of Ieper (Ypres in French and “Wipers” to a generation of anglophone troops) is finally doing very well out of the war. There is hardly a hotel bedroom or restaurant table to be had and the museum, “In Flanders Fields”, in the Cloth Hall is frequently congested. The forty five kilometer […]
The Sausage and I
The Old Town in Bratislava could serve well as the set for one of those Eastern European towns in a Hammer film. Narrow streets nestle under the castle. In reality, they are full of tourists; in the films they tended to fill up with men with big moustaches and even bigger sticks and dogs […]