What a wheeze
The Diary has learnt that words such as "wheee" appear less frequently on websites the more "e"s you add to the end of them - and the decline is more rapid than expected from existing language rules...
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Do your research first
Prince Philip has made yet another gaffe. At the opening of a new research centre at the University of York last weekend, he told bemused onlookers: "It is surprising the way things have changed...
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Don's diary: enlightenment and kneecapping
Saturday I am walking through Knightsbridge to see U. G. Krishnamurti, an independent philosopher with a reputation for being nihilistic, as well as enlightened. U. G. has six people with him and...
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Why I believe philosophy still matters
I do not believe philosophy is a means to much - I am from the cradle a philosopher of Michael Oakeshott's bent and believe with him that philosophy does not yield a recipe for doing anything, and...
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Outsider's manifesto
Enough old boys - Oxford needs a change, says Sandi Toksvig, who has entered the chancellor's race It is not something that has occurred to me before, but I am hoping to follow in the Duke of...
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Intellectual fibre, not nuggets
The government wants McUniversities, but Dennis Hayes says a diet of solid research is all we should serve Top-up fees and student debt are not the most important issues in the government's white...
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In a bit of a jam
Pity poor Graham Zellick, vice-chancellor of London University, who was unable to register as exempt from the capital's congestion charge because the university pays his bills. Professor Zellick has...
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Wanted: cut-price v-c who packs a punch
Higher education is to be given its own directorate within the Department for Education and Skills for the first time to help the sector to "punch its weight" in Whitehall. Advertisements will appear...
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Voices of the still tortured
On the Natural History of Destruction
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What Bush owes to petty king
Classics in Progress
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First Impressions
This week's competition, in which you have to identify a book from its opening sentence, is from a book named after a poem by Yeats: "Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even...
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Of rocky empires and solid marriages
White Mughals
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Towers toppled, hedges uprooted
The West and the Rest
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Why some neighbours hate and others do not
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life
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Designer lacking in marital arts
The Architect and His Wife