Free the world from coursebook English
Not all English teachers are native speakers, says Luke Meddings - so by encouraging conversation-driven teaching, we can allow other models of the language to thrive.
‘National treasure’ archive up for sale
Battle to keep outstanding 19th-century archive in UK.
Cold comfort
Ali Smith is awed by Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, Rebecca Brown's unflinching look at bereavement
Who’s crying Wolf?
Naomi Wolf's decision to accuse Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom of sexual assault 20 years after the alleged event at Yale has triggered a furious row, with Camille Paglia branding it a witchhunt. Was Wolf right to speak out?
An artificial paradise
AS Byatt on Baudelaire in Chains, Frank Hilton's study of the poet that focuses on his opium addiction
French intellectuals attack ‘war on intelligence’
More than 20,000 French artists, thinkers, film-makers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics have signed a petition accusing the centre-right government of 'waging war on intelligence' and instituting 'a new state anti-intellectualism'.
Ghouls for schools
Joanna Carey on the winners of our competition to find the perfect ghost story.
Book targets Manchester’s ‘corporate’ vice-chancellor
Australian academic accuses Professor Alan Gilbert of leaving Melbourne University a 'quasi-privatised institution'
The age of Kant
According to Monty Python's philosophers' drinking song, Immanuel Kant was "a real piss ant, who was very rarely stable", a joke that worked when Kant was seen as an upright man.
Graham Martin
Literary critic and cultural studies innovator.
Kant’s wild years
According to three new biographies, the celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not such a dry stick as has previously been thought.
Call this English lit?
When Mark Jones and Gerry Carlin showed their students video porn all hell broke loose. Here they explain why their coursework features hardcore sex alongside Burroughs, Blyton and Joyce.
Lord Bullock of Leafield
A prolific and public-spirited historian, he founded an Oxford college and defined the nature of tyranny and evil in the 20th century.