ROSALIND RAWNSLEY recalls a visionary educationist For centuries, a child’s mind was considered a tabula rasa on which the teacher would do his best to imprint a series of facts which with a bit of luck would give the pupil all the basic tools needed for him to make his future way in life – as the…
Temple of Concordia and statue of Icarus, Agrigento, Sicily - SHUTTERSTOCK ALLEGRA BYRON witnesses the winnowing of the Western curriculum In the final scene of Hamlet, the Danish kingdom lays in ruins: a corrupt leader bleeds to death; a poisoned First Lady takes her last breath; a young nobleman dies by his own treachery; and…
MICHAEL WILDING surveys the sorry state of Australia’s universities The systematic degradation of the universities has now been continuing for 40 years. It began at the end of the 1970s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Australia dutifully followed suit. The policies were a mixture of reprisals…
As the SNP again attempts to prise Scotland out of the UK, STUART MILLSON engages in a little counter-factual fantasy Professor John Curtis of Strathclyde University, the country’s leading psephologist, had (within a few percentage points) been proved right. Ever since the announcement of a second independence referendum by Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the…
Jacek Karczmarczyk, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons WILLIAM STROOCK reforges an old musical allegiance In 1987 this scrawny, disgruntled 14-year-old became a metalhead. It’s an old story. I hated school and life and everything, really. Metal was the best available outlet for expressing that. I stamped my feet and pumped my fist to…
Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 Simon Reynolds, Faber & Faber, 2019, 608 pages MARK GULLICK savours an appreciation of an excitingly original music scene Punk rock in both its British and American incarnations is probably as thoroughly documented as any musical genre. Punk seen as a transition, stage or catalyst, however, and…
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD recalls the shambolic genesis of the Stones’ masterpiece At about eleven on the Monday morning of 9 March 1970, a somewhat distressed-looking olive green, midsized BMC lorry of the kind typically used to haul heavy goods around the country, crunched up the gravel driveway of a sprawling manor house located just outside the…
The Cumaean Sibyl, by Elihu Vedder, 1876 The Aeneid: A New Translation Shadi Bartsch, Profile Books Ltd., 2020, 400 pages [Book VI only for this review] Aeneid Book VI Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 2016, 53 pages LESLEY SAUNDERS compares two notable translations of The Aeneid’s pivotal Book VI It feels peculiarly apt, and particularly…
LIAM GUILAR likes a radical reimagining of a venerable Welsh work Isolated in Aber Cuawg Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher Press, 2020, 19 pages ‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun, means a sick person, a patient or a leper . Abercuawg is an area of north…
CAROLINE DAVIES has an MA in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her books are Elements of Water (Green Bottle Press 2019), Convoy(2013) Voices from Stone and Bronze(2016) (Cinnamon Press). She co-hosts the Ouse Muse poetry readings (Bedford) currently taking place online. These poems are from her latest project, Strange Alchemy, poems…