Here’s a question. Some of you might be able to answer it from direct personal experience; for others, it’s a hypothetical. But in all cases, it’s interesting. (Well, I think it is, anyway.) Imagine you love a particular academic subject. Maybe it’s music; maybe it’s physics, or history, or French,
It’s been a while. Missed me? I’ve missed me – or rather, I’ve missed the me that hasn’t been dragged down by a seemingly never-ending cold virus which showed up just before my holiday (of course it did) and then hung around for weeks making me feel like a sort
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
It’s that time of year again: essay marking. My lovely undergraduates at Middlesex University have been beavering away all year on long projects, which I am now tasked to assess. This is the time of year when academics sit together to discuss bloopers, inadvertently hilarious appealing spooling mistales (see what
It’s the end of term, and I’ve spent an amount of the last few weeks talking to undergraduate students at Middlesex University about their big written projects, due in early May. They are, as ever, in various stages of completion: from almost full drafts, to agonising blank pages. And it
If you are a keen musician, and you want to give a concert at the glorious Foundling Museum, where I am fortunate enough to be Public Events Programmer, you are required to fill in a form that I designed not long after starting the job. It’s not particularly complicated. You
Last week, the psychologist and author Steven Pinker published a lengthy article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called ‘The Intellectual War on Science’. In it, he discusses at some length the vilification of science in the popular press, and indeed in university training (he’s primarily talking about the USA,
On Saturday evening, I had the pleasure of returning to the city where I spent five happy years as a university student – Nottingham – to give a pre-concert talk about Brahms’s First Symphony. As the train rumbled north out of London, I spent a bit of time staring out
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
