One of the most best-known conversations about Dublin took place in Zürich, when James Joyce was walking down Universitätstrasse with his friend Frank Budgen. “I want to give a picture of Dublin so...
A friend in her early forties has the onset of her IVF treatment cancelled because of Covid-19. She is devastated. Another is in lockdown with a partner many of us know is overly controlling and who we...
Darwin was sick most of the time. He spent his adult life trying to recover from the physical toll taken by his famous Beagle voyage. But he was also fascinated by disease, especially diseases, like rabies,...
A few years ago, I saw my daughter perform in her school musical, Singing in the Rain. I had performed in many such shows in my youth, and watching her I vividly remembered my own experiences singing,...
Two days ago, with my partner, wishing to avoid public transport, I cycled across Paris on a vélib (city bike) from the 2nd arrondissement where we live to the suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, in order to have...
Writing in The Guardian, Marina Hyde eloquently illustrated why the last thing we need just now is Second World War metaphors. ‘Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse’ she observed, ‘he...
My Bajan grandfather was a carpenter. He worked on the Panama Canal Zone where there were gold and silver payrolls (white employees were paid with a gold standard, blacks with a silver), gold and silver...
A recent article in The New Yorker pointedly asked what the humanities should do in a crisis[i]. Similarly, in our own humanities group we have had many conversations of late about the meaning of what...
In A Political Science Manifesto for the Age of Populism, David Ricci argues that the rise of populism in the twenty-first century is a product of growing resentment caused by mass economic and creative...
On July 9, 2011, it was announced with great fanfare that South Sudan had become the world’s newest nation state. As new countries are wont to do, that very day President Salva Kiir promulgated a new...
Lasers...'a solution looking for a problem'? Gregory J. Gbur author of Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering, 2011 debunks this early misconception with a clear explanation of what a laser is, and exactly how it works!
The Mughals of India – eponym of grandeur, source of the word ‘mogol’ – what kinds of records did they keep, and where did they keep them? For decades, this question has plagued historians of...