The Plashing Vole

On Wednesday we celebrated 50 years of English at this university. We invited former colleagues, students and friends of the department to a...

Popped over for lunch today in the school canteen with the new England captain, Joe Root. He seemed like a very nice chap as he signed shirt...

Well, perhaps not all newspapers. The liberal ones will send their Toynbeebots up to the dreadful slums once every five years to wring th...

So, many terrible things are happening and they're happening so fast that I can't keep up. I'm living in two time zones: my own,...

This Be The Verse adapted with no apologies from Philip Larkin's original , in honour of the new regimes in the USA, Britain, India, ...

I'll keep this one brief.  A lot of people active on social media think that BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg is biased, ...

The resignation of Jamie Reed  MP to spend more time with his mildly radioactive money was hailed on the right as evidence that 'sensib...

Last year's end-of-term report seems so sweetly naive now. There I was in a deserted office (just like today, only it's a different...

This week I have mostly been going to cultural stuff. And watching my friends and colleagues marking essays. As I'm on a sabbatical (cou...

I just got an email from the Birmingham branch of the Glee Club, a chain of comedy venues. Something didn't look quite right. Can you ...

This week has mostly been dominated – at the risk of sounding like the egregious Martin Amis – by my teeth. I'm part way through a dent...

Who am I? According to my spam folder for Nov 10th-15th I am: a heterosexual woman unsatisfied by her boyfriend's small penis a lon...

This is my last comment on the US election for now. Though I'm sure I'll get sucked back in before long: I liked the Joe Biden p...