The guns fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The time and date of the 1918 Armistice acquired significance quickly. The first Remembrance Day was just two years later.  On 8 November 1920, Brigadier General Louis Wyatt had arrived at a makeshift chapel at St Pol in northern…

I was scammed a couple of weeks ago.  It began plausibly enough: an apparent LinkedIn message from a senior politician who I know a little.  It was soon clear, from the content of the torrent of messages that followed, that he’d been hacked and his connections were being targeted.  I clicked out of the conversation…

It’s that time of year again.  Not necessarily Keats’s ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’: there’s the first hint of a chill in the morning; the evenings are beginning to draw in.  But it’s the start of a new academic year.  I love it.  I love the preparation and the busyness, the sense of potential,…

We went to the cinema twice over the summer. The first time, my wife and a couple of my daughters took me to see Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the new film featuring the music of Abba. If you’ve seen it, I can reassure you that we won’t be re-designing our graduation ceremonies. If…

It’s that time of year. July – the middle of the calendar year – appears to mark the definitive end of each academic year.  The campus quietens; residences empty; you can book a room for a meeting or get a table in a campus café; one set of students’ union sabbatical officers gives way to…

Clausewitz famously maintained that war was the continuation of politics by other means. If the soccer World Cup had been around in the early nineteenth century, he would have worked football somewhere into his dictum. Almost every World Cup game is more than a sporting encounter: issues of national identity verging into national stereotypes, patriotic…

We take it for granted. It’s been described as the closest thing we have, now, to a national religion. It’s probably become politically untouchable. We have all either depended on it or had a family member or close friend who has depended on it.  It remains a tribute to the genuinely visionary political leadership of…

Driving home from an evening out on Saturday, the radio was on, and we caught the end of a programme on Radio 4’s Listening Project.  If you don’t know the Listening Project it does pretty much what it says on the tin:  it eavesdrops on conversations between people about something important in their lives, and…

There’s an envelope, with government franking.  You are obviously wary about what it might contain, so when you open it and the news is that you’ve been offered a knighthood, you really are flabbergasted.  There’s a form to fill in indicating whether you would be willing to accept, together with a firm instruction on confidentiality.…

Imagine, for a moment, a global gathering of university leaders somewhere in rural England.  The gathering is addressed by the Queen and by Nicola Sturgeon.  Both talk in engaged and committed terms about the strategic importance of universities in economic growth, social cohesion and change leadership.  There’s a reception after the event, and both remain…