The bicycle transformed life in the nineteenth century. The idea that early bicycles were inefficient bone-shakers is for the birds: by the later nineteenth century, efficient bicycles with pneumatic tyres and ball bearings were common. One J.C. Skeffington toured southern England in 1858 for three weeks and, without avoiding the hills, averaged more than 26…

Sheffield Hallam University is at the heart of its city and its region; I’ve written before that this shapes our purpose and mission in powerful ways. But it is also an international university. It connects the world to Sheffield and Sheffield to the world, both through the students it draws to Sheffield and through the…

You don’t have to be a football fan to remember it. In the 1990 World Cup semi-final England played West Germany. The game was even after extra time and went to a penalty shoot-out. The Germans dispatched all of their penalties but Chris Waddle blazed the final spot-kick over the bar to seal England’s fate.…

Winston Churchill called it his ‘black dog’. Stephen Fry has spoken openly about his suicide attempts in 1995 and 2012. J.K. Rowling has written about how her experiences of depression shaped her descriptions of the soul-sucking Dementors introduced in the third Harry Potter book. These accounts – increasingly familiar to us – are simply well-known…

James Morris was born in 1926, and was educated at an English public school and Oxford before serving in the Queen’s Royal Lancers toward the end of the Second World War. In 1953, he was the journalist attached to the expedition which conquered Everest. His account of Hillary and Tenzing’s historic ascent was memorably published on…