Several years ago, in my last job, I was invited to do some work in Xiamen on the Chinese coast. A young Chinese student was allocated to look after me, to show me around and, I guess, to make sure I didn’t do anything undesirable. He was, he told me, very interested in England and…
The news crashed in day after day: a Chancellor of the Exchequer sacked by the Prime Minister, largely for implementing policies on which the prime Minister has campaigned; a new Chancellor junking the entire contents of a budget published just a couple of weeks before; Home Secretary fired for elementary security breaches; chaotic scenes in…
Let’s be clear from the outset – Sheffield Hallam University, one of the country’s largest, most diverse and successful universities, is committed to offering an exceptional range of courses across disciplines. The arts and humanities are a vital part of our contribution to our students, our region and the world. Currently we offer over 600…
One Saturday just before the pandemic we went over to Worksop to visit ‘Mr Straw’s House’. Now in the care of the National Trust, it’s an ordinary enough terraced house which, after Mr Straw died in 1932, was barely changed at all by his family. It is a time capsule of early twentieth century domestic…
It’s not over. It’s particularly not over in the global south, where vaccination rates and hospitalisations continue to place enormous strain on often rudimentary public health services. It’s not over in the UK either, though here vaccination appears to have broken the link between infection and hospitalisation. It’s not over, but in many small ways,…
The Government has announced that all legal pandemic restrictions will end on July 19. Covid is not over: as the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid has said, as a society we are going to need to learn to live with Covid-19. Clearly, he isn’t wrong: Covid-19 is simply the latest coronavirus in global circulation. Four…
There’s an old, and now very hackneyed story which used to feature a lot in management training courses, about how (the example was always a frog) if a frog is in a saucepan of water which is gently heated, it simply doesn’t notice the change in temperature until it’s too late for it to react.…
As “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” discovered with Humpty Dumpty, it’s always difficult to put things back together. So we should all be sympathetic to civil servants and ministers as they attempt to navigate a road map out of Covid lockdowns. Nonetheless, the government’s announcement last week that there should be…
In 1642, as the English civil war broke out, government control of printing presses collapsed. In this new censorship-free environment, all sorts of ideas, previously suppressed were published. Many senior figures became worried, and it was that worry which lay behind the pamphletAreopagitica, by John Milton – later the author of Paradise Lost. Almost four centuries…
In 1942, at the height of the second world war, the British government published a report prepared by the economist William Beveridge. Despite its somewhat austere title – Social Insurance and Allied Services – Beveridge’s report sold vast numbers of copies, and is widely regarded as having laid the foundations for the post-War Labour government’s…