The campuses blossomed into new life last week – like the sudden arrival of spring – as our students arrived and returned. By the end of Friday, 23 September, 11,019 (that’s 96%) of our new students had fully enrolled, and 14,890 returning students had re-enrolled (that’s 91%). The sheer numbers involved are remarkable, and the…

In very early photographs of towns, villages and cities, something appears to be missing: there are almost never any people in them.  There’s a technical reason for this. Due to the long exposure time, many individuals who walked the street were not in place long enough to make an impression.  The first photograph to capture…

It’s the beginning of a new academic year.  Malcolm Bradbury’s novel, The History Man – itself a vicious satire of 1970s university life and morals – opens at the beginning of a new academic year with a few sentences which catch the sense: “Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. …