The Plashing Vole

The end of last week was both sad and joyful: it mainly consisted of self-anaesthetising myself at a party to mark the departure of one of m...

I have no opinions this week. Instead I have a pile of marking, a new nephew in New Zealand, lots of Module Specification Templates to wri...

“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as t...

Well, here I am, in the deserted building on December 23rd. I like it when there's nobody here (this also happens in the depths of summe...

There is no Star Wars and me really. Coming from a large rural family which viewed VCRs as an instrument of the devil, being inside and...

A while ago I read a children's novel from the height of Empire called  Behind the Mountains   by Wray Hunt , a Victorian/Edwardian nove...

Way back in February 2011,  Vogue  ran a grovelling interview and photoshoot of Asma Al-Assad entitled  A Rose in the Desert , which went ou...

One of the interesting things about social media is that it's so emotionally open. Anyone can turn up, express a depth of emotion – posi...

I went off to a sixth form college yesterday to run a 'taster session', designed to enthuse some teenagers about a) taking an Englis...