Super-campus booster
France is using governance reform and investment to push its universities up the league tables. Will it work? asks Paul Benneworth
France is using governance reform and investment to push its universities up the league tables. Will it work? asks Paul Benneworth

Kerry Brown on a sobering snapshot of a ravenous giant whose new prosperity could bring global tragedy
Fred Inglis searches for insights but ends up bored by personal accounts of the absence of activity
Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century. By Sheila Rowbotham. Verso, 312pp, £17.99. ISBN 9781844676132. Published 3 May 2010For 30 years, Sheila Rowbotham has been at the...
When A Biographical Dictionary of Film was first published in 1975, critical reaction ranged from delight to outrage, often within the same review. Describing it in Sight and Sound as "the sort of...

Steve Redhead on an uneasy mix of gaming-culture study and European academic discourse
"The People in between/Looked underdone and harassed/And out of place and mean,/And horribly embarrassed." Lawrence Napper doesn't actually quote Hilaire Belloc's poem The Garden Party. But he well...
It is said that you can't judge a book by its cover, and for many who pick up Stephen Neff's Justice in Blue and Gray, that axiom will be challenged. With its blue-gray metallic background and its...
Stewart Mottram delights in Shakespearean scholarship that finally gives Wales its due
From the title on - with its echo of W.E.B. Du Bois' founding text of African-American consciousness, The Souls of Black Folk - this book explores the relation between race, disability and popular...
Sustainability at universities generally falls into three categories. First, there is research on sustainability. In Britain, a reservoir of funding is ready to be tapped by directing research...
The flaws are the most interesting part of an economist's valuable thesis, says Omar Malik
Garry Runciman prefaces his book with an apology for the title, which he says may make it appear "unserious". The title is certainly provocative, and the book slim, so in compensation he packs it...
The recent news that presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev signed a new US-Russia nuclear arms treaty produced widespread sighs of relief. But wait - read John Mueller's book before breaking...
John Coyne on an all-too-familiar campus lament: managers are bad and academics know best