In 1989 the chairman of my department asked me to find out how many Ph.Ds had been awarded by the department which was exactly a quarter of a century old at the time having grown from three members originally to more than a dozen. The answer was eleven; if you look at the website of […]

My “right wing” credentials are obscure but impeccable. I did not join the Oxford Union because I had better things to do. I believe I did join the Oxford University Conservative Association but only because someone paid my subscription so I could vote for him (undergraduate politics in those days was pure banana republic). I […]

Consider two famous statements associated with the eighteenth century “Enlightenment”! The first comes from the second paragraph of the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776. It says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . […]

There are over four hundred published pieces of music which accredit William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry as their inspiration; in November 2023 BBC Radio 3 ran a day of tribute to them. Some, like Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Tchaikovsky’s or Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet are extremely well known and […]

(Career and portfolio academics) Many years after the event I was told that my advancement was once successfully opposed on a promotions’ committee when someone from the science faculty reported that he had seen me described as a “travel writer” in a Sunday newspaper. It was a tiny incident in an incipient culture clash in […]

Brown poses as black And grey as white Eejits impersonate leaders And grown men feign pain they do not feel Boys pretend to be girls And morons pass as intellectuals Nonentities play act celebrity And darkness sells itself as enlightenment Many claim to believe in democracy And everyone says that they care Time for the […]

I met William Waldegrave in 1968 when I was a graduate student and he was an undergraduate. We were introduced by Peter Sinclair, a contemporary of mine, a very nice man who became a distinguished economist and who sadly died in 2020 as one of the first victims of the original, virulent, strain of Covid. […]

We must start with confessions. For the purposes of breadth and ambiguity I will use the American term “faculty”. When I was a student I spent a lot of time with faculty. I got drunk with such and was more formally wined and dined by them. I went on holiday with faculty (in the Alpine […]