Uncategorized Category
Ukraine: What the media doesn’t tell us, Part One
Posted on March 8, 2022 Leave a Comment
It is difficult to find out exactly what is going on in a war, any war. The press from each side is usually biased, it is difficult for journalists to get to battle sites, there is a genuine element that people do not know what is going on, and there is of course military secrecy, […]
Student Assessment
Posted on January 19, 2022 Leave a Comment
As an academic, one of the most important tasks I do is to mark students’ work. In terms of job satisfaction the task varies from those rare occasions when a student produces some superlative work to the usual drudgery of working through seemingly endless essays or exam scripts, each one a poor copy of the […]
Being offended
Posted on January 16, 2022 1 Comment
Society is full of people who appear to be offended by so many things. In our ‘woke’ times (horrible term) it is apparently necessary to take offence at the slightest thing, often when the object of the offence has little to do with the person claiming to be offended. It is a little like people […]
Of Human Bondage
Posted on December 5, 2021 Leave a Comment
I enjoyed Spinoza when I read him as an undergraduate. I had some feeling for his interpretations of god and human behaviour. He was a rationalist, which fitted my youthful desires to understand the universe. He was a sort of pantheist, with god being everywhere and everything rather than being a bored bearded old chap […]
‘To read without joy is stupid’
Posted on November 27, 2021 Leave a Comment
The title is a quotation by John Edward Williams, a US novellist I knew nothing about until a couple of days ago when Sue showed me his novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in Derby Waterstones. On the back it suggested that this was a book that influenced Cormac McCarthy, so as a fan of McCarthy I bought […]
Dr Nigel Hunt 