The Plashing Vole

I feel like my head's going to explode. I share an office with four people. We all have our own phone lines (0800 666 VOLE in my case). ...

Thanks to yet more bureaucratic tyranny by our European overlords, intent on restricting the ancient freedoms of the Anglo-Saxon financial s...

Congratulations to the owners of the Billy Wright pub, opening tonight. I'm informed it's named after the truly great footballer , n...

That's the motto of The Dark Place. Sometimes it's true. This song is 'Stuck', by Ned's Atomic Dustbin. It was composed ...

The second stop on my cultural tour of London was Grayson Perry 's ' The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman ' at the British Museum, ...

I had a whirlwind cultural weekend: down to London for the V&A's Postmodernism exhibition, the British Museum's Grayson Perry T...

Anyone else massively depressed by this? I sincerely hope that the company responsible has miscalculated the public's egotism. I pre...

The semiotics of David Cameron's Christmas card are fascinating. Of course his children are in it: privacy is something you wield as...

I'm a huge fan of Joy Division/New Order/Electronic/Revenge/Monaco/The Other Two and whichever other splinter groups there are. And so I...

OK: counselling my dissertation student - done. Very interesting proposal concerning dreams and memory in Pat Barker's novels. I'll ...

The bloody Guardian  isn't covering today's hearings of the Leveson Inquiry. I tweeted one of the journalists to ask why, and he sai...

OK, here's something for you to ponder over lunch - a familiar old conundrum. Who would you invite to your dream Christmas dinner (or ...

The media are leading today with the news that an exam board has been running seminars for teachers to show them how to get the kids to pas...

Andrew Vincent, professor of political theory/philosophy, speaking on The Politics of the University . Summary of his take on recent univers...

Some interesting animations covering the material we learned about at Café Scientifique last night:

Over at the Paris Review , they're telling the story of Bruce McAllister , the 16-year old who in 1963 had an argument with his English ...

Cafe Scientifique in Birmingham was a blast. It was held in the upstairs room of the fine Jekyll and Hyde pub. The clientele covered the ra...

Don't take your kids to the new Muppets  movie. Despite it being a Hollywood production replete with the inevitable corporate tie-ins, F...

It's a fun-packed day today: marking the three Shakespeare forums on which I've fallen behind, counselling the lost sheep about thei...

A chance conversation reminded me of the Lost Age of non-commercial indie music, which died out when Britpop became chart fodder. One scene ...