Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
‘They court the notice of a future age/ Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land’. Today’s users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are members of the ‘future age’ that William Cowper talks of in his poem ‘On Observing Some Names Of Little Note Recorded In The Biographia Britannica’. For students, this makes the […]
I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.
I wrote a biography of John Williams, essentially, because I have loved his music since I was nine years old.
Legal professionals need content they can depend on—accuracy, authority, and integrity are non-negotiable.
Prague is a city steeped in history, where music has long been intertwined with its cultural identity. This playlist captures that spirit, featuring compositions that reflect the grandeur of its imperial courts, the struggles of its people, and the resilience of its artists.
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena.
Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.
When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.
As the days get cooler and autumn approaches, it’s the perfect time for a fresh start. Back to school is here.
Every September, caregivers and kids alike prepare for one big change: the start of a new school year.
Animals caring for their young, such as a lioness carrying her cub by their scruff or a matriarchal elephant herd nursing young calves, are the kinds of behavior that many would pay good money to watch on a safari.
The financialization of Western economies has unfolded as a prolonged systemic failure. What began as a mechanism to support productive enterprise has evolved into a structural dominance of finance over the real economy.
In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury.
‘Where do you want to go today?’ served as the tagline for software giant Microsoft’s global marketing campaign running through the mid-1990s. The accompanying advertisements were replete with flashy images of people around the world of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds engaging in a diverse range of activities.
In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.
I often tell my students that biology has become a data-driven field. Certainly, there’s a general sense that methods related to biological sequences (that is methods in genomics and bioinformatics) have become very widespread. But what does that really mean?