Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century
In 1998, after organising an international conference on New Orleans, I offered an essay collection to publishers, who declined on the grounds that there was limited specialist interest in the...
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The Last Pagans of Rome
If you have a week of uninterrupted spare time, a knowledge of Roman imperial literature and history, however dormant, a passable command of Greek and Latin, and you have enjoyed reading classic...
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Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
All becomes clear in an admirable account of the hunt for the Higgs Boson, writes Athene Donald
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Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy
William Poole examines a pioneering anatomist's explorations that advanced medical knowledge
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Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation
In the days following the death of Osama bin Laden, a quote attributed to Martin Luther King pinged about social networking websites and into email inboxes: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious...
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My other half
A typographical slip gave Lois S. Bibbings an authorial sex change, and while she pondered textual 'gender reassignment', her alter ego made off with her kudos. Still, she can't help liking the...
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Violence of the lambs
Polyglot polymath and scholar Barbara Oakley takes a incisive look at the cult of the victim. Matthew Reisz reports
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Diary
LondonIndonesian Eye: Fantasies and RealitiesThe Saatchi Gallery is hosting what is said to be the first-ever European exhibition of contemporary Indonesian art (running until 9 October). It was put...
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The Pick - Memory Remains
Memory RemainsImperial War Museum, LondonOn 11 September 2001, photographer Francesc Torres was living two blocks from the Twin Towers and witnessed the second impact while talking to his mother on a...
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Delusions of languor
As we go to press, we learn with deep regret of the institutional confinement of Professor F.R. Beavis, Head of our Department of English and Related Studies.It appears that this most unfortunate...
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A conspiracy against academic freedom (1 of 2)
I was quietly reading 糖心Vlog when all of a sudden a gang of some 100 frenzied historians appeared, intent, it seemed, on riotously attacking a certain David Starkey ("Starkey's a...
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A conspiracy against academic freedom (2 of 2)
Geoffrey K. Pullum's otherwise praiseworthy article, "Inflammatory language" (18 August), was marred by his comparison of David Starkey to the now infamous rose-quaffing Croydon looters.Verbally...
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Reach out and touch them
Following your article on the 糖心Vlog Policy Institute's analysis of the higher education White Paper ("Elaborate, ineffectual and unfair: the White Paper takes a beating", 18 August), I...
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Of the Book, but not on ours
The article "Ditch 'baggage' at door of Muslim-Jewish course" (25 August) is in error in two respects. First, the University of Cambridge has not, as reported, approved the master's course referred...
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Rank and filed
"The mile is no longer a mile" (Letters, 25 August) and in a sense, that is as it should be. The job of A levels is to rank students in order: a place in tertiary education is (in the main) a case of...