The Plashing Vole

How to publicise the good work you do at The Blast Lab , Imperial College London? Simple. Use lab equipment to perform brutal blues pastich...

Open Day today - lots of (hopefully) eager young tykes keen to press their noses up against our institutional windows to see what their futu...

Sigh… I've just been to a colleague's lecture on Secular and Religious Forms of the Apocalypse in Popular Culture. Two hours reall...

If you're immured in this godforsaken city on Friday February 17th, don't go all the way to the canal for the purpose of ending it a...

Channel 4's The 10 O'Clock Show  is - like its father The Daily Show  - not quite as good as it thinks it is, but Charlie Brooker...

Soundtrack to my evening: Tindersticks, 'Another Night In': Stars of the Lid, 'Dungtitled (in A Major): much more majestic...

Blogging about the weirdo-mystical section of 1930s British fascism the other day led me to the British Fascisti , later the National Fasci...

This film ticks every single box in my list of pet hates. 1. Based on a schmaltzy, manipulative book which easily-impressed people think...

Despite just going on about falling out of love with music, I still have a soundtrack to my life, though I'm starting to think that that...

Can one ever have too much of a good thing? The thought crossed my mind as I looked at my music collection and I wondered whether I was a fa...

If you've read Baroness Warsi (Tory cabinet minister with no responsibilities, appointed to make David Cameron look non-sexist and non-r...

Teaching did not go well today. On the agenda was a short children's novel, Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons , a leftwing R...

The book drought is ongoing. I didn't receive a single one last week, though I may have ordered one or two. Over the weekend I bought an...

This was circulated at the weekend: It's pretty clichéd, but some of it rings true. Certainly all my friends talk about 'three mon...

I've been teaching a module for final-year students called 'Positions' - my role is to lead the strand dealing with class, both ...

A Cornish song, famously turned into a graffiti challenge on a mine's wall, ran 'Cornish men are fishermen/Cornish men are miners to...

You may have noticed that the Tories have floated the idea of letting the super-rich off some of their taxes in return for employing more s...

Probably 40 people here - a scattering of staff. On the panel: Emma Reynolds MP, Paul Uppal MP, Jane Nelson from the university Executive an...