When, before AD77, Pliny the Elder remarked that Palmyra “had its own fate” between the Roman and Parthian empires, what had been a remote oasis in the Syrian desert a century earlier was becoming a...
Yongjin Zhang considers a meticulous effort to unwrap the riddle inside an Eastern enigma
The argument that the “War on Terror” and counter-terrorist measures are a threat to civil liberties is not a new one. In the current climate of austerity, it is not surprising that the enjoyment of...
Craft, in Glenn Adamson’s view, has continuously referred to a process or an activity rather than a discipline on its own. Adamson, head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has written...
It’s not just hot air: balloons allow our historical imaginations to soar, Robert J. Mayhew discovers
A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers
Alex Danchev applauds a study of one of the 20th century’s greatest thinker-painters
An expert in manufacturing technologies who went on to spearhead the research programme at the University of Nottingham’s Chinese campus has died.Nabil Gindy was born in Cairo, Egypt on 3 November...
Queen’s University, CanadaSusan MummThe new dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario said she was “excited by the prospect of working at one of Canada’s...
Weekly transmissions from the blogosphere
Display hoardA student dressed from head to toe in medical equipment is one of the highlights of the University of Brighton’s Graduate Show. Karol Michalec’s artwork (top, left) – which he says...
In Silver Linings Playbook and Homeland, mental illness is not sentimentalised or stigmatised. Hollywood could do with more such rounded representations, Davina Quinlivan argues
Students are growing keener to stand up for their consumer rights when encountering perceived wrongs. Is the sector doing all it can to ensure that its conduct in resolving disputes is consistent,...
Felipe Fernández-Armesto welcomes efforts to cross academic divides
As John Kaag has discovered, parenting a toddler involves a rather different set of challenges from the ones posed by the academy