Odds and quads
If this shoe looks good enough to eat that is hardly surprising - it is made of cheese.

If this shoe looks good enough to eat that is hardly surprising - it is made of cheese.
A weekly look over the shoulders of our scholar-reviewers

Old school - Universities, stuck in the past century, are failing today’s students
Over half of current final-year students would not have gone to university if they had faced tuition fees of £9,000 a year, according to a new study.
Back in the summer of 2005, I spent a lot of time travelling back and forth to visit the university I was to join in September. I had already had a good look at the place, and worked out all the...

By Scott Jaschik, for Inside Higher Ed
Lecturers at the University of Stirling are due to strike on 26 April in a dispute over job losses.
A group of 11 universities has produced more than half of all the spin-off companies to have been launched by higher education institutions in the past 10 years, according to new figures.
A nightmarish vision of the worst that the future could hold for English universities was set out at the Association of University Administrators conference at the University of Nottingham this week.
Glasgow Caledonian University has had its licence to sponsor foreign students temporarily suspended by the UK Border Agency.

Graham Farmelo is impressed by a fresh look at the UK's performance in a much-debated conflict
Beneath some Mad men poppycock, Geoffrey K. Pullum spies a smart survey of linguistics in action
In spite of the populism of the title, this is a difficult though forceful book. The Foucauldian "fugitive" of the subtitle gives the game away, for this is a reading of early modern theatre in the...
In the most heartfelt and important chapter of this book, Robin Fox laments the loss of Lewis Henry Morgan's vision, the "high mandate" to explore the universal history of humankind. For Fox, Morgan'...

Jon Turney on a book that grapples with planetary issues but fails to justify its own subtext