In the third and final of my City Lit ‘taster’ sessions this week, one of my students regarded me with raised eyebrows after some point I’d made about Lieder. ‘You’re one of those tutors who tells jokes, aren’t you?’ she declared. ‘Good.’ As you might expect, I get quite a
A few days ago, a friend directed me to a fascinating article on the ever thought-provoking Aeon magazine site, about stupidity at work. Not the sit-on-the-photocopier-with-your-pants-down kind of stupidity – nor indeed the stupidity of getting something catastrophically wrong and landing your superiors in hot water. This is about the
I have four e-mail addresses. I marvel at this on a rather regular basis – not least because, when you have four e-mail addresses, remembering to check them all frequently is a constant process of re-remembering their actual existence. The simple reason for this overabundance of communicative channels is that,
Now that the new academic year is just around the corner, I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about Being New. Beyond such high-profile press examples as the intimidation factor of concert hall for the uninitiated, being a newbie is a common feature of our daily lives – in
