Author: Ophelia Benson

Children who read more are better at reading, researcher says.

Flaubert’s letters tell more of him than a biography can. Julian Barnes on the late Flaubert scholar Jean Bruneau.

A star system for a few while the drones barely make a living. Is this education or show biz?

6 jam versus 24 jam, and libertarian paternalism.

And not a summer cottage read. George Graham reviews Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.

Dr. Faustus meets Horatio Alger, and Rowling piles on the horror.

Watching ‘Big Brother’ can be lazy or maybe postmodern, but ironic, no.

Opinion on him was divided, as it would be on any animal with the rib-cage of a hippo and the snout of a badger.

‘…no audience is easier to beguile than one that is smugly confident of its own sophistication.’

Another call for ‘demotic science’ from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Surprise, surprise, it’s not always good to talk.

What is a lost tribe anyway? From Marie Antoinette to Imelda Marcos, what are the uses of ‘simple people’? Where does the World’s Fair come in?

The blank slate became Official Theory, enforced by “accusation, intimidation, name-calling and moralising intellectual questions that are questions of fact”.

The Guardian offers a page of Orwell links.

Does enlightenment summon its own enemies into being?

And interesting issues are raised – is objectivity possible? If not, why write history at all? Why not just pledge allegiance to something?

Philip Foner helped himself to students’ work, and many of them fumed but kept quiet about it.

‘…the outlandish claims that were frequently made for Potter made you wonder whether some of these people had ever read anything else.’

It’s become hip to regress into childhood.