Very Short Film competition: we have a winner!
We’re very pleased to annouce the winner of the Very Short Film competition 2013. The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012.
Medical Law: A Very, Very, Very, Very Short Introduction
By Charles Foster
By the standards of most books, the Very Short Introduction to Medical law is indeed very short: 35,000 or so words. As every writer of a VSI knows, it is hard to compress your subject into such a tiny box. But I wonder if I could have been much, much shorter. 88 words, in fact.
A Very Short Film competition
By Chloe Foster
After more than three months of students carefully planning and creating their entries, the Very Short Film competition has closed and the longlisted submissions have been announced.
The discovery of Mars in literature
By David Seed
Although there had been interest in Mars earlier, towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a sudden surge of novels describing travel to the Red Planet. One of the earliest was Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880) which set the pattern for early Mars fiction by framing its story as a manuscript found in a battered metal container. Greg obviously assumed that his readers would find the story incredible and sets up the discovery of the ‘record’, as he calls it, by a traveler to the USA to distance himself from the extraordinary events within the novel.
Stone Age dentistry discovery
By Claudio Tuniz
Advanced analytical methods, based on radioactivity and radiation, have recently revealed that therapeutic dental filling was in use during the Stone Age. As part of the team that performed the study, I worked with experts in radiocarbon dating, synchrotron radiation imaging, dentistry, palaeo-anthropology and archaeology. Our discovery was based on the identification of an extraneous substance on the surface of a canine from a Neolithic human mandible.
How do you write a Very Short Introduction to English Literature?
By Jonathan Bate
My last three books have been a 670 page life of the agricultural labouring poet John Clare, a two and half thousand page edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, and a 500 page “intellectual biography” of Shakespeare in the context of his age. So how could I resist an invitation from OUP to write a VERY SHORT book!
Very Short Introduction: Sexuality
A few questions for Veronique Mottier, author of Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction
A Very Short Introduction to Modern China
Rana Mitter talks about his Very Short Introduction to Modern China
A Q&A with Katie Stileman, Publicist for the VSI series
Katie Stileman works as the UK Publicist for Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series (VSIs). She tells us a bit about what working for OUP looks like. If she wasn’t working on publicity at OUP, she would be doing publicity for Taylor Swift.
Announcing the VSI Roadshow 2016
This year, 2016, is a very special year for the Very Short Introductions (VSI) series. Not only is our 21st birthday but we are also publishing our 500th VSI title in the autumn. Since our launch in 1995, Very Short Introductions have been filling in the gaps of our knowledge with a VSI to almost everything.
1914: The opening campaigns
To mark the outbreak of the First World War, this week’s Very Short Introductions blog post is an extract from The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, by Michael Howard. The extract below describes the public reaction to the outbreak of war, the government propaganda in the opening months, and the reasons behind each nation going to war.
Romanticism: a legacy
By Michael Ferber
The Very Short Introductions are indeed very short, so I had to cut a chapter out of my volume that would have discussed the aftermath or legacy of Romanticism today, two hundred years after Romanticism’s days of glory. In that chapter I would have pointed out the obvious fact that those who still love poetry look at the Romantic era as poetry’s high point in every European country. Think of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Leopardi, Lamartine, Hugo, and Nerval. Those who still love “classical” music fill the concert halls to listen to Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Wagner; and those who still love traditional painting flock to look at Constable, Turner, Friedrich, and Delacroix. These poets and artists are still “alive”: their works are central to the culture from which millions of people still draw nourishment. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I would feel if I knew I could never again listen to Beethoven or read a poem by Keats.
Five books to celebrate British Science Week 2023
To celebrate British Science Week, join in the conversation and keep abreast of the latest in science by delving into our reading list. It contains five of our latest books on plant forensics, the magic of mathematics, women in science, and more.
Looking into space: how astronomy and astrophysics are teaching us more than ever before [podcast]
On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we’re looking at what these recent discoveries mean to our understanding of the universe. Why should we all know about distant galaxies? How will this learning impact us? And what role will artificial intelligence and machine-learning play in the wider astronomy field in the coming years…
Five books to celebrate British Science Week
To celebrate British Science Week, join in the conversation and keep abreast of the latest in science by delving into our reading list. It contains five of our latest books on evolutionary biology, the magic of mathematics, artificial intelligence, and more.
The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more
Listen to season three of The VSI Podcast for concise and original introductions to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves.