The Plashing Vole

In her own Christmas address, the Queen referred to 1992 as an 'annus horribilis': part of one of her castles had caught fire, a dow...

Dick Tuck, I think it was, once gritted his teeth in the face of an electoral defeat and muttered that 'the people have spoken, the b...

They're wearing hats and gloves in hell this morning, for Radio Four has provoked me to stand up for my Vice-Chancellor. This is worse t...

Yesterday saw the first day of the UCU strike : staff at 60+ universities walking out – against their instincts – to highlight the enormou...

This has been an exhausting but exhilarating week, and next week promises to be more of the same. Lots of my colleagues have been doing Blac...

I've had a great week in terms of teaching: two Margaret Atwood novels either side of last weekend ( The Handmaid's Tale  and The Ed...

Week Six in the Big Academia house and the inmates are getting restless. Assignments are due. Attendance is down. Eyes are bleary. My coll...

Apologies for the slight delay in transmission - no blog last week because I've been so busy. Lots of new lectures to write, a PhD exami...

Note: first paragraph uses the N-word in the context of classroom discussion. Hello from the end of a long, draining, but also exhilaratin...

I seem to have been thinking about race and empire a lot recently, thanks to the way my teaching and reading have worked out. Earlier in the...

In haste today, as I'm teaching all afternoon (the Frankfurt School applied to Black Panther); got the Open Day talk (shout-out to the ...

Another Friday rolls by and I feel both aged and exhilarated. Aged by the relentless series of organisational failures that have enraged stu...

It has been - even by Induction Week standards - a humdinger. We have students, though an amputee could count them on her finger. They are i...