When Geoffrey Howe became Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1979 General Election, one of the first people to contact him was his Labour predecessor, Denis Healey. Healey wanted to tell Howe that although there were huge challenges in managing the UK economy, the challenge of using the kitchen in Number 11 Downing Street was almost as…
You know the puzzles: look in one way, and it’s a vase; in another way it’s two faces in profile. Optical illusions of all sorts make the point that what you see depends on what you are looking for. As I write this, we are halfway through the fortnight-long highlight of Sheffield Hallam’s year which is graduation.…
I’ve said, and written, before that Hallam is a remarkable place. It is a huge university, with extraordinary things going on in different places. Almost a year in – and I’ll come back to that later in the year – still not a week goes by without my discovering something I didn’t know before. One…
As Kathryn Schulz points out in her fabulous book Being Wrong, we all get things wrong, but rarely like to admit it. There are any number of reasons why we get things wrong: we look at the wrong clues in the evidence before us; we have the wrong prior beliefs; we fall back on stereotypes; we rely too…
On Friday morning, 11th November, the University will be holding a two-minute silence at 11 a.m. to mark Remembrance Day. I shall be leading a gathering in the entrance foyer of the Owen Building at City Campus, and Professor Karen Bryan will lead a parallel event in Heart of the Campus at Collegiate. I’m told…
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…