The Plashing Vole

THE ironically-named Office for Students is taking an advent-calendar approach to publishing a slew of disturbing documents reinforcing thei...

 I'm only in semi-lockdown: face-to-face teaching is still happening in reduced circumstances for a little longer but compared with my f...

 I'm way too tired to do any blogging this week. Too tired to have any opinions, despite quite a lot  going on in the world, from Trump ...

 Yet again I find myself posting around midnight - partly because it seems to be the only free time I have at the moment, and partly because...

 Here I am at midnight trying to sort out tomorrow's two face-to-face seminars. Not because I'm slack and always do my homework the ...

 We're all – I presume – experiencing a weird new emotion that's equal parts terror and boredom, brought on by the formless, endless...

Well, here we are at the end of a second week of term. We've been teaching in person and by video, and my colleagues and I are exhausted...

So here we are, a couple of days into the new academic year. I'm at one of the institutions that is doggedly insisting on face-to-face t...

I found myself alone in London one day, heading to a book launch promising a keynote lecture by Stephen Greenblatt, the Renaissance expert. ...

 These are from a visit to Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. It's very much a place that evokes differing reactions. The National Trust took i...