It has always “amused” me, to some extent, that the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was conducted by a bloke whose name is a near homonym for “augur”, the noun form of which denoted, in Ancient Rome, a religious official who observed natural signs, especially the behaviour of birds, interpreting these as an indication of divine approval or disapproval of a proposed action.

The government has told us that we must “learn to live with the virus”. It is undoubtedly true that coronavirus is not going to disappear any time soon. However, a sizeable minority of people cannot learn to live with a virus that continues to pose a deadly risk. I suffer from panhypogammaglobulinemia. This unpronounceable condition was triggered by the chemotherapy drugs that I received a decade ago.

Yesterday, I examined a Ph.D. It’s not an unusual experience – and huge congratulations to the candidate who had a well-deserved pass! But every time I go through this process I spot a number of weaknesses in the UK examination system that really should be put right. These reflections are not specific to the thesis I just examined. They are, rather, a broader policy reflection on the process.

Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Franklin E. Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature: Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), situate its birth as “English language and literature” in 1828 at the University of

Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a “chromoclasm”. The proposition that Pastoureau seeks to advance is that the austere aesthetic favored by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther – linked to the avoidance of graven images and varying levels of iconoclasm – reoriented the color spectrum around a ‘black-gray-white axis’ (p. 124). Yet the challenge here lies

I’ve spent the past few weeks tracking down answers to the questions: “When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?” for my work on Paper Thin . Here are some of my very abridged findings. This sounds as though it’s a trivial question. Obviously, we think, it must have something to do with contrast and ensuring the best legibility. This is definitely not the case.

It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley;

This morning I have been looking at the UK government’s so-called “Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill”. The politics of this are extremely complicated, but suffice it to say that when the Minister for HE ends up having to say that the legislation will help get Holocaust deniers onto campus, it doesn’t exactly look great. As I have noted before, academic freedom is actually very hard to define and varies between jurisdictions.

This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model. This group of international funders is committed to a complete transition to open-access publishing. To date, critics have claimed that the cOAlition has been too wedded to the (inflationary) Article Processing Charge business model, although Plan S is theoretically neutral on this matter.

I posted, a short while ago, about the reprinting of OA books under CC licenses. This is, of course, totally legal and allowed under the more liberal Creative Commons licenses. However, it will, I feel, alienate academics from OA. I think that they will consider it derogatory treatment of their work. In any case, I have now contacted Saint Philip Street Press and asked for my attribution to be removed. This has now happened and it worked.