����Vlog

It’s good to talk

Rosemary Deem (Letters, 9 May) offers a constructive critique of the views expressed in “Whim and rigour” (25 April) and mentions my PhD research. It involves observing ­doctoral vivas in different...

Poor return on investment

Regarding “Israel Academia Monitor fears the enemy within” (News, 16 May): your article misses an important part of our round-table debate on academic freedom in Israel.Radical scholars who use their...

Come join in our crusade

The Tories have unleashed the biggest assault on ordinary people for generations. It needs to be met head-on.The People’s Assembly Against Austerity is a key opportunity to bring together all those...

Asset management

����Vlog warned recently of a “stark choice” of where spending cuts must be made as a result of the government’s spending review (“Hobson’s choice? Not if we can help it”, News, 16 May...

Bin the sour grapes and check the spec

István Aranyosi has left us in little doubt about his prowess as a budding researcher, and I certainly hope that he fulfils his promise (“No one should be hired on the basis of whether their face...

The week in higher education - 30 May 2013

If it had wanted to, the ����Vlog Office could have issued a loud raspberry to its critics in the higher education sector after figures showed a rise in visa ­appli­cations for university study. Overall...

Piled Higher and Deeper by Jorge Cham - 30 May 2013

Roger Brown, Sylvia Brown, Michael Patrick Cullinane, Sandra Leaton Gray and Gordon Thomas...

A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History by Derek Sayer

Marta Filipová on compelling tales of a city’s artistic, intellectual and political cultures

Northern Ireland: The Reluctant Peace by Feargal Cochrane

Cheryl Lawther on a history of the conflict and peace process and how the past continues to affect current attitudes

Top Student, Top School? How Social Class Shapes Where Valedictorians Go To College by Alexandria Walton Radford

Sandra Leaton Gray on inequality in access to higher education in the US as a result of class

Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information by Malcolm McCullough

Tara Brabazon on a rare and evocative exploration of how to cope with digital overload

Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship by John B. Radner

Willy Maley finds men behaving badly in this compelling account of a literary coupling

Weird Life: The Search for Life that is Very, Very Different From Our Own by David Toomey

Lewis Dartnell regrets that a discussion of extreme life forms focuses on faint possibility rather than wondrous reality

Youth unsure of university cost-benefit analysis

Tuition fees major concern for schoolchildren, Sutton Trust discovers