The Plashing Vole

Maybe I'll institute a regime of single daily posts rather than a stream of random Reckons. What do you think?  Here's a moody, wi...

Welcome, friends, to Marking Hell, In Marking Hell, academics are condemned to face the consequences of their teaching. Those little jokes, ...

Afternoon everybody! I haven't just got up, I've been marking essays all day, having sent off my Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Ge...

Doonesbury's got it in one today - on the subject of blogging. Poor Rick Redfern was a respected newspaper journalist until social media...

While you lot have been truffling in new media's celebrity trough, distributing Stephen Fry's latest aperçus  and OMGing over Justin...

Damn the Guardian . I was all set for a massive amount of work, when it linked to this rather wonderful site , tailor-made for people like m...

Back when he was young and didn't have so many media advisors, George Osborne said what he thought. In particular, he encouraged people ...

Right, I need a little break from the writing (it's going quite well, thanks, though I suspect the editing will be a nightmare), so I...

Sometimes students come in, distraught, having missed a deadline because they got the date wrong. Some of them are liars, but most of them h...

Hi everyone. Here I am, back at my desk and what a joy it is merely to be able to type that sentence. As I'm sure you can all imagine. I...

Hello everybody. How were your Christmases (those of you who mark Christmas at all)? I've had a long break from blogging by my standards...

It's like the Marie Celeste round here. Just me and some underemployed catering staff whiling away their time trying to chisel through ...

In total contrast to the life-affirming dedication which made Nick Musgrove a pivot of my university's community until his untimely deat...

I got up this morning and trudged to work through the drizzle and barely noticed the sirens and police tape sealing off the ring road outsid...

One of my agents in Shropshire (I have agents everywhere) sent me a classic piece of local opinion journalism, by a chap called Peter Rhode...

Hi everybody. I know it's almost time to go home, but I've been working really hard today and tried to stay off the computer for as ...

Hopefully like me, you'll have been sickened by the murder of 20 children and six adults in Newtown Connecticut. Sickened, but not remot...

No, not me: a proper academic. My English department went out for a Christmas meal on Friday and my boss regaled us with his tales of life i...

Here's what loyalists did for 8 days following the democratically-elected Belfast City Council decision to fly the Union Flag only on c...