July 2023: war raged in the Ukraine. Fire raged in a dozen Mediterranean countries. There were unprecedented heatwaves all over the Northern hemisphere. In all the big and historic cities of Europe crowds jostled and congregated in front of any famous painting or building. So we went to Lincolnshire. I had more or less the […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
Colleagues as friends?
I remarked that I was writing an article about friendship in academic life and the recipient of the remark replied, “That’ll be a short piece, then”. One should perhaps recall the old MP explaining to the young one that the people on the other side of the House were the opposition while those on your […]
Down with Skool
William Brown, Richmal Crompton’s “Just William”, is faced with a telling-off from a teacher for not paying attention. A hundred years ago, the teacher remarks (it is the 1920s) he might have been made to crawl up chimneys for a living instead of being educated so he should consider himself jolly lucky to be in […]
The Joys (and Terrors) of the Pyramid
Monday May 8th, 2023: to Burnley, for a meaningless football match between the home team and Cardiff City. Meaningless, that is, in a really nice way because the home team, which I support, were already promoted to the Premier League and confirmed as champions of the English Football League and, for that matter, the opposition […]
Seventy Years A’Foraging
The most jaw-dropping thing I have read in a twenty-first century newspaper was a culinary item. The writer was recommending what most Southern English people would call blackberries but I would call brambles. There was a time, they said, when you could just go out to the countryside and pick them, but urbanisation and modern […]
We’re All Nouveau Now
In the 1960s in France there began a revolution in cooking which was in many ways parallel to the creation of art moderne forty years earlier. As with the artistic revolution – and unlike its musical equivalent – the new was to become the orthodox and came to dominate the hierarchies and structures of its […]
Vlad’s Wee Lassie
(Or/ Nicola and Niccolo) In February 2023 Nicola Sturgeon resigned after eight years as First Minister of Scotland. She was described as hard-working, patriotic, passionate and sincere and I don’t doubt that she is possessed of all these virtues. A majority of Scots were of the opinion that Scotland was better for having had her […]
Strawson, Truth and Three-Card Brag
(This note was first posted on a Cambridge University philosophy website edited by Huw Williams in January 2023.) Watching the debate about truth between Peter Strawson and Gareth Evans is an intensely nostalgic experience for me. Gareth was my exact contemporary with whom I attended many lectures, tutorials and classes. Peter was my tutor in […]
Things you should never do
(if you want to be happy in the twenty first century) “Try anything once, except for incest and Morris dancing.” I have always believed it was Sir Thomas Beecham who said this as it has the ring of his cheery cynicism about it. Unfortunately there is no evidence of where or when he said it […]
Gareth Evans – philosophy’s prodigy and tragedy
(Originally published 2022 by Engelsberg Ideas. See https://engelsbergideas.com>portraits/gareth-evans-philosphys-lost-prodigy) University College, Oxford, October 1964: the economics fellow, David Stout, has assembled the twelve freshmen PPE students for their first class. This is an unusual procedure as lectures and individual tutorials are the normal means of teaching, but Stout is preoccupied with persuading any government and political […]