It is an eye-wateringly powerful critique. The influential journalist Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the current edition of The New Yorker, shines a harsh light on the US’ national college rankings.The...
Much of the Ivy League eschews interviews when filling posts, says Amanda Goodall, and UK universities keen to hire the best should follow suit. But Richard J. Evans, appointed to a chair at...
Chris McManus is impressed by a multidisciplined tour de force that simply oozes scholarship
Duncan Wu is gripped by a tale of a remarkable family's careful crafting of its public standing
This book is intended for a popular audience. It is low on technical detail, rhetorically selective in its presentation of research findings and light-hearted in tone: but none of this should deter...
The past few decades have seen the rise of "whiteness" studies, which explore the cultural construction of white power. The studies demonstrate how anti-African-American hostility was constituted as...
The People's Republic is buying into Western consumerism. Kerry Brown counts the costs
This volume dangles the lure of much enjoyable moral indignation. Readers are promised "example after example of harassment" and "vile and hateful speech", after which they will "never again see the...
It is perhaps unsurprising that a major literary classic written in the late 16th century should prove if not inaccessible, at least difficult to approach for the modern reader. The paradox, in the...
GlasgowJohn Cage - Every Day is a Good DayThe US composer John Cage (1912-92) was most famous or notorious for 4' 33" - in which a "performer" sits at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence...
Credit: Green Porno/SundanceSexual NatureNatural History Museum, LondonUntil 2 OctoberSex has been around for about a billion years - plenty of time for it to get complicated. Male bedbugs stab their...
"Thanks, but no thanks." That was the shock response from Mrs Lillian Daunting, a spokesperson for our university cleaning staff, to the proposal from the Unite union that the children of cleaners...
Charles R. O'Melia, an expert on water treatment, was known among his peers as someone who retained a humble demeanour despite being a leading scholar in his field.The professor emeritus in the...
Gary Day worries that the increasing presence of China in Africa might be history repeating itself
Duncan Wu finds a CIA thriller based on real events in Bush's White House more compelling than fiction