The world today: 09 October 2009
A round-up of higher education news from across the globe
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QAA berates Greenwich over academic standards
Watchdog demands that ‘misleading’ information and ‘inconsistencies’ are addressed.
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World today: 8 October 2009
IsraelFears that budget cuts will threaten Nobel attainmentBudget cuts in Israeli higher education will make it difficult for academics to win honours such as the Nobel Prize, the Council for Higher...
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Microcosmographia Administrativa
F.M. Cornford published Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician in 1908. This tongue-in-cheek guide to academic life, while a masculinist affair, describes the...
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The 'Elephant' in the hotel room
Saint-Saëns and the sensual, curvaceous, exquisitely crafted creature that is her cello have restored Deborah Bowman's love of learning
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Book of the week: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Will the web's total recall threaten our identities? wonders Henry Farrell
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Muriel Spark: The Biography
Martin McQuillan finds flashes of biographical gold revealed despite a life self-mythologising
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1939: Countdown to War
Dealing with history constantly raises the question of perspective. In his magnificent How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, Donald Cameron Watt states that the cataloguers of...
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The Canon: Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
Language, Thought and Reality is not a very interesting title for a book, and in many ways Benjamin Whorf's subject is not very promising either, being about the structure and nature of language....
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Security and Environmental Change
We should heed this warning against militarising environmental hazards, writes Tim Dunne
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Bugs and the Victorians
Bugs and the Victorians is an exploration of the coming of age of entomology in Britain. The collection and curation of insects, our omnipresent and abundant companions, was nothing more than a...
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Killing in War
It is commonly said that "all is fair in love and war": soldiers have the moral right to kill other soldiers in wartime whether or not their cause is just. One reason is that soldiers are permitted...
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The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience
When it comes to mammalian development, play's the thing, as Sue McHale discovers
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Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
There is a shortage of books on applied ethics, if not moral philosophy, and this one helps to fill that gap. Its style is that of a chatty lecture, with regular pauses to take notes, deal with...
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The Wolverhampton Tragedy: Death and the 'Respectable' Mr Lawrence
There are an increasing number of opportunities in crime history to expand the often-denigrated genre of the "true crime" book. The long-established popular genre, defined by lurid red and black...