The Plashing Vole

Today is going to be a good day. I have a meeting to discuss a fun joint paper on masculinity, jazz and the modern novel. I have a presentat...

'cos I'm part of the union: a rather neat old Unison advert for the benefits of solidarity:

I wonder if Newsnight will bother to reply… Dear Newsnight, after Peter Lilley's appearance on Newsnight to discuss the economics of...

The Guardian  has done a data exercise to analyse the social composition of Britain's universities. As you might expect, dripping is not...

As I gather my Vice-Chancellor is an avid reader of Plashing Vole, here some educational material for the benighted Black Cat:

Thanks to Unlucky Dip for spotting this one. Not an entirely accurate paraphrase of Derrida, but not too far off. Added irony of course bec...

Hi everyone. Amidst all the political and social gloom, The Hegemon starts a week of graduation ceremonies today. No, I don't know why w...

Groan. Here we go again. A bunch of self-appointed moral arbiters from the reactionary right are demanding that the government makes ISP...

REF looms threateningly above us, teaching starts in a couple of weeks and the world seems to be moving very quickly compared with my summer...

Here's a simple question for my colleagues, friends and all the academics I know who seem to churn out learned articles all the time. It...

When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that political satire was dead, so grand was the gesture of giv...

Very pleased this morning. British Fencing held an Olympics photo competition to find good pictures for a poster campaign. Overall winner g...

I don't normally do advertising, but I was impressed by the Festival No 6 line-up and location - in Portmeirion, the bonkers architectur...

Meet Michael Green. He's written the 'must-read guide to bouncing back from recession to growth' . I don't know who said tha...

I like quite a few sports. Fencing, GAA, soccer, ice hockey, darts, cricket, snooker, kabbadi, rugby league, handball… anything combinin...

Isao Hashimoto took the acknowledged data on nuclear detonation and turned it into an computer game simulation. It works visually because ...

London Met university has lost its state licence to sponsor visa applications by non-EU students: under the system, the government waived i...

So, Sir Rhodes Boyson is dead. For you young folk, the Tories didn't always have professional trolls like Louise Mensch to amuse and v...

Before we begin, an historical footnote: the Republican Party was founded in 1864 and soon joined by Abraham Lincoln to unite the disparate ...

It's almost comical how Nick Clegg gets it wrong even when he gets it right. This time, he's proposed a ' time-limited wealth ta...