Mersey-Lancs links spark fears
No urge to merge with Liverpool, insists Lancaster's v-c, but union sounds warning. John Morgan reports

No urge to merge with Liverpool, insists Lancaster's v-c, but union sounds warning. John Morgan reports
The EPSRC's funding shift from investigator-driven work to application-driven R&D is misguided, says Philip Moriarty

Richard J. Evans weighs a High Court judgment that awarded an academic £65,000 in damages for negative coverage of her work

Technology is, of course, an aid to education, says Frank Webster, but we must teach students how to evaluate and filter information

Turn off the TV, hide the phone and wallow in the low-tech luxury of a book, urges Valerie Sanders

Biologically based aversions have fed into social and philosophical thinking, finds Simon Blackburn
When I heard about this book, I assumed it was a joke. A.C. Grayling's satirical new "college" shows he's capable of it. But this book is much stranger and more interesting than that. It's deathly...
Can there be anything more to say about Dickens? Probably not, J. Cuming Walters declared in 1911 - "Of what there is to say of Dickens little has by now been left unsaid" - yet here we are, a...
Kerstin Hoge finds little to shout about in an evolutionary theory of male and female speech
On 25 March 1586, Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic in York, was crushed to death as punishment for harbouring a priest. Just to repeat - crushed to death. This terrible event has resonated with...
Fred Halliday was an indefatigable traveller and a tireless writer. In David Hayes' selection from the 81 essays Halliday published on the openDemocracy website between 2004 and his untimely death...

Laments about the ease with which we can be hypnotised by our past are merely the frustrated rants of culture's now-redundant gatekeepers, argues Philip Dodd

The future lies in greener, more intimate communities, Gary Day hears from a geographer on the edge
LondonHe Who Dared: Dirk BogardeDirk Bogarde, who died in 1999 but would have been 90 this year, was one of the most celebrated and enigmatic British actors of his generation. Although he started his...

Credit: Natasha RazinaRare event: Richard Strauss' opera Die Frau ohne SchattenEdinburgh International and Fringe FestivalsEdinburghEdinburgh is officially a city of 12 different festivals, but, with...