Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Matthew Beaumont
Pater’s most celebrated and controversial book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) is about the distant past, superficially at least, and therefore risked seeming irrelevant even in his own time. It could not however have inspired a generation of undergraduates, including Oscar Wilde, to embrace aestheticism, and a cult of homoeroticism, as his critics claimed, if it had not also been a coded polemic about the present.
By Tatiana Holway
Two hundred years ago today, on 3 August 1813, Joseph Paxton turned ten. In a farm hand’s family of nine children, this was likely to have been a nonevent. A decade after that, the day would also have come and gone like any other.
By Jonathan Kroberger
Today is International Beer Day and there’s nothing we like to talk about more than a few good brews. Between the Oxford Companion to Beer, America Walks into a Bar, Beer: Tap into the Art and Science of Brewing, The Economics of Beer, and several episodes of The Oxford Comment, OUP employees have managed to imbibe a little expertise in the area.
The Mabinogion is the title given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c.1400). They were never conceived as a collection—the title was adopted in the nineteenth century when the tales were first translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest.
The World Championships in Athletics takes place this month in Moscow. Since 1983 the championship has grown in size and now includes around 200 participating countries and territories, giving rise to the global prominence of athletics. The Ancient Greeks were some of the earliest to begin holding competitions around athletics, with each Greek state competing in a series of sporting events in the city of Olympia once every four years.
Linda Woodhead
We are living through a very significant historical change: the collapse of the historic churches which have shaped British society and culture. The Church of England, by law established, is no exception. A survey I recently carried out with YouGov for the Westminster Faith Debates (June 2013) shows that in Great Britain as a whole only 11% of young people in their twenties now call themselves CofE or Anglican, compared to nearer half of over-70s. The challenge facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is to address this decline. But the initial indications suggest he may be heading in the wrong direction.
By Ken Crossland
The story of Rosemary’s Clooney’s rise, fall, and rise again to the summit of American music is a story unparalleled in American showbiz history. From her emergence at the archetypal girl-next-door in the Fifties, through to her late life renaissance as an interpreter par excellence of jazz and popular song, Clooney’s 57-year career scaled all the heights.
By Audrey Ingerson and Stephanie Rothaug
We’ve all heard of the classics: vanilla, chocolate, rocky road, mint chocolate chip. But what about the crazier end of the spectrum? Flavors like cherry blossom, chocolate marshmallow, chorizo caramel, sea salt, chai tea, or cinnamon toast.
By Alyn Shipton
(1) Harry nearly had no career at all after he accepted a dare as a teenager to slide down a fast running flume at Wofford Heights in California. After sliding down the waterway for several miles at high speed he narrowly escaped with his life by grabbing a metal bar above his head and hauling himself out of the rapid current.
By Peter McDonough
If you’ve visited Rome, you may have noticed that the Jesuit headquarters, right off St. Peter’s Square, overlooks–“looks down on”– the Vatican. Jesuits are fond of reminding visitors, with a smile, of this topographical curiosity and its symbolic freight.
By Thorstein Veblen
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalisation that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man’s high hat.
I would love to visit Africa someday. I think it would settle a lot of curiosity I have about the world. For now, my most informed experience regarding the place is a seminar I took this past semester, called Sacred and Secular African American Musics.
By Peter McDonough
Vocation directors report a ten percent bump in applications to the Society of Jesus since the ascension of a Jesuit to the papacy. The blip reflects a certain relief. The personable contrast that Pope Francis offers to his dour predecessor shifts the motivational calculus.
By Robert Goldney
To some this heading may seem unexpected. The term ‘suicide bomber’ has entered our lexicon on the obvious basis that although the prime aim may have been the killing of others, the individual perpetrator dies. Indeed, over the last three decades the media, the general public , and sometimes the scientific community have uncritically used the words ‘suicide bomber’ to describe the deaths of those who kill others, sometimes a few, usually ten to twenty, or in the case of 9/11, about two thousand, while at the same time killing themselves.
We don’t often discuss book awards on the OUPblog, but this year the inaugural British Academy Medals were awarded to three authors and their titles published by Oxford University Press: Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, edited by Noel Malcolm; The Organisation of Mind by Tim Shallice and Rick Cooper; and The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia (USA only).
By Arthur Shimamura
We love art. We put it on our walls, we admire it at museums and on others’ walls, and if we’re inspired, we may even create it. Philosophers, historians, critics, and scientists have bandied about the reasons why we enjoy creating and beholding art, and each has offered important and interesting perspectives.