The Plashing Vole

In case it's not common knowledge, Bahrain - which has just seen peaceful protesters shot dead -  is an awful, repressive place. The Sun...

My grandmother is 98 at the weekend, and I'm stuck for a present. Last year's was, frankly, a disaster. Who knew that a skateboard w...

Here's the shocking story of how the alcohol merchants got together with untrustworthy researchers and lobbyists to stop the Scottish g...

If you didn't have a great Valentine's Day - or if you did - you need to watch the inimitable Charlie Brooker's How TV Ruined Yo...

OK, the awards ceremony wasn't like the Golden Clerics  (watch it here ). For all my teasing, the prize-winners were the magnificent int...

Congratulations to Neal, Map Twat Monkey, for gaining a Distinction in his MSc. If you need help with your hemp-lime walls and energy-effici...

A few more in the post: teen fiction for next year's Literature and Identity course, if I still have a job then. Nancy Garden's Anni...

Yes, they've finally ditched the insane plan to flog off the woods to the spivs (if you want to know what happens when Tories sell land...

I've just been to Raphael Selbourne's talk about his novel, Beauty, and run a seminar afterwards. Both were fascinating and stimulat...

One of the problems of subscribing to the otherwise wonderful London Review of Books is that it keeps bringing to my attention books that I...

This is what David Cameron said - a few days ago - about Advantage West Midlands, a quango optimistically designed to encourage investment ...

We all know that Paul Uppal isn't exactly au fait with the modern world: he had a party mandated blog for about a week in the run-up to ...

What could be more picturesque than a naked man drying all his genital crevices under the wall-mounted hand-dryer? Google appears to lack ...

I've just received a massive book: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed : basically an architecture-porn tome of the most bonkers...

Many thanks to Who The Fudge Is Benjamin Judge for the bottle of 2003 vintage port. I gave him a reference for his Manchester Uni Creative ...

I read an interesting piece about what our personal libraries say about us. It shouldn't be a surprise that collections indicate a cu...

One of the interesting features of Egypt's semi-revolution was the United States's tortured negotiation between its pro-democracy rh...

Here's a bitter, satirical poem from Philip Larkin which may strike a chord. It's called 'A Study of Reading Habits': Whe...

Six people died in a plane crash in Cork, Ireland last week. An evangelical God-botherer survived with minor injuries: One of the survivo...

Well, I feel like going to bed. It's been a long day. I will say though that I really enjoyed my seminar with the 3rd-years. We did Mund...