If you enjoyed the repetitive didacticism of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, you will love the Barbie movie. Robert Tressell’s once famous novel dealt with the realities of class, but Barbie presents the more important reality of feelings. Time was when ‘pink’ had been a way to describe the left-of-centre, politically. In…

A completely underestimated part of our constitution came into being 150 years ago today, 18th July 2022. This was the Secret Ballot Act. Before 1872, anyone emancipated by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 would still have had no real vote. Anyone who held their land from someone else…

‘Cultural Capital’ is a buzzword in some schools, but no-one in schools seems to know what it means. They tell you that Pierre Bourdieu came up with the phrase, but they use his phrase to mean the opposite. They think ‘cultural capital’ can set people free; that it can be…

Teaching children about death: not everyone’s idea of a really great gig. An Anglican bishop wants schools to do it. There are supposed to be lessons on grief. …

Once there was a book, Inside UFO 54–40. It was one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’. Books like that, in the 1970s and 1980s, gave readers an option about what would happen next. At points in the narrative it was the reader who would choose whether to turn…

The novelists I like most do not write as they should. They write in every way that I was told not to. W.G. Sebald can take a page to finish one sentence. László Krasznahorkai’s sentences are multiply parenthentical, full of complexes. He can write a novella in a sentence. …

It used to be said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Fish and bicycles have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Yet they have more in common, than AI has with God. So I was pretty cast down by a conversation recently. “Artificial…

My aunt was schizophrenic, which came on in her twenties. She had come from a large and poor family and my grandparents took her in as a child when her parents could not pay for her. There were disconcerting times with her but I do remember that she showed me…

Should an engineer teach Maths, or Physics? Should a medieval historian teach Latin? Should historians teach RE? The teachers say, no. Specialists should teach students, they say. Yet it is a fact that students are being certified through exams when taught by non-specialists. If specialists knew something that non-specialists needed…