( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Congratulations to Gail Trimble *and her team* on winning University Challenge. I was astonished to hear that far from being praised for her success, the poor girl has come in for a load of abuse. Isn’t it depressing that people still feel threatened by a clever woman? This seems symbolic of the anti-aspirational attitudes found everywhere today. ( Read more... )

The whole of Radio 4's Front Row programme this evening was devoted to the poet Tony Harrison, who is coming up for seventy and ought to be Poet Laureate. The son of a baker, from a home without books and with parents who were 'inarticulate', he went on to study classics, translate Greek drama for the National Theatre and become a major poet. At ( Read more... )

So Gordon Brown wants to raise the amount of capital funds for each state school pupil to the level seen in private schools. Education problem solved, eh? Some of us received our early education in classes of forty five, in schools with outside lavatories, double desks bolted to the floor, pre-war textbooks (the Piers Plowman Histories) and no ( Read more... )