'Our fate was in our own hands'
When an expensive international experiment faced collapse, Don Braben and his collaborators, unfettered by micromanagement, pooled their intelligence and ingenuity to ensure success
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Book of the week: The Idea of Justice
Alex Danchev is bowled over by an impassioned discussion of reason and humanity
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Saving Kyoto - An Insider's Guide to the Kyoto Protocol
Anthony Giddens feels the authors have looked at carbon trading through rose-tinted glasses
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The Communal Gadfly - Jews, British Jews and the Jewish State: Asking the Subversive Questions
Some things live to be ephemeral: morning glories, cabbage white butterflies and newspaper columns. So it was with apprehension that I faced this collection of op-ed columns from The Jewish Chronicle...
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The Canon. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
In stark stylistic contrast to almost any work of philosophy you care to name, Thus Spoke Zarathustra dances from the pages with a florid exuberance that can border on the embarrassing. Its scope, as...
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'History goes on; human beings don't change very much'
John Gray says he is no despairing grump, just trying to help us by injecting realism into political thinking. To that end, he tells Matthew Reisz, his essays do not skirt the nasty, shabby sides of...
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Published this week
ART AND DESIGN- Monument Wars: Washington, DC, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial LandscapeBy Kirk Savage, associate professor and chair of the department of art and...
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First principles define the 'good' academic
Having seen the recent correspondence regarding the administration costs attributed to academic independence, I felt compelled to respond ("Running battles on the governance front line", Letters, 17...
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Dangerous experiment
The least we're entitled to expect from an exercise that claims to assess research excellence is that it embodies research principles ("It's evolution, not revolution for REF", 24 September). When it...
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Against the odds
You characterise Thomson Reuters' success rate for predicting Nobel prizewinners "at about 15 per cent, with seven of its 45 predictions made between 2002 and 2008 proving to be accurate" ("Brits...
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'Partner' is not the word
Your article on the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) ("Saudi Arabia begins putting minds to challenges of future", 24 September) states that the University of Cambridge and...
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Anarchism never left
Alex Prichard celebrates the return of anarchism as an academic subject ("More than mayhem", 24 September), but one might ask if it ever went away. As the convenor of the socialist history seminar at...
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A latte with your alienation?
When I was a postgraduate at the University of Birmingham a few years ago, my office overlooked the Muirhead Tower (Original Features, 24 September). It was generally regarded as the ugliest building...
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Quantum of solace
Having recently been awarded a doctorate, I would like to thank George Steiner, the literary critic, for inspiring me on my quest to resubmit my thesis.I was devastated when I was asked to resubmit...
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On the origin of calumnies
An open letter to Lord Drayson from Charles DarwinMinister, it is a most distressing eventuality to find one's life's work "distorted" in the popular media. Last night, I attended a cinematograph...