How well do you know Mary Shelley? [Quiz]
How well do you know Mary Shelley? Take this short quiz to find out and put your knowledge to the test.
Pulling the whole length of one’s leg
Today, most English speakers will recognize the idiom: to pull one’s leg means “to deceive playfully, to tease.” Its origin has not been discovered. I usually stay away from guesswork, but in a blog, vague conjectures may not do anyone any harm.
A summer playlist inspired by Oxford World’s Classics
To help curate your summer playlist and reading list, here are 10 songs and Oxford World’s Classics we recommend you add to your rotation:
Were you prepared for this pandemic?
Did you have a stock of fitted, unexpired N95 masks in your closet and a six-month supply of non-perishable foods in the pantry? Pretty much nobody was fully prepared, including me. Were you relying on the healthcare system to keep supplies on hand? Should we expect better preparedness from ourselves and our society?
Democracy at work? France’s uncertain political future [long read]
In the last of our essays, we discuss the unexpected outcome of the legislative elections and look back on the electoral cycle as a whole. What does French politics look like after a series of fractious campaigns? And do the results offer any hope for the future?
Global health diplomacy and North Korea in the COVID-19 era
The COVID-19 pandemic set off an unprecedented scale of border closures, a rise in health nationalism, and inequitable global distribution of vaccines, which have all exacerbated the humanitarian situation in low-income countries. This has led to calls for greater cooperation to support vulnerable populations beyond sovereign borders.
Spelling Reform and after
In this blog post, the Oxford Etymologist discussed the English Spelling Reform movement.
Best practice: contributing to the global police community from the United Arab Emirates
There is limited focus in scholarly and practitioner publications on policing in the Middle East and this is a problem in the global policing field because states like the United Arab Emirates are, by many measures, safe places. This asks the question: how are the police and law enforcement organisations achieving this enviable position?
Individualization of war or de-contextualization? A social critique
A look at how examining the regulation of war through a social lens can provide important insights into the relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
Pronouns and joint possession
I’ve been noticing compound possessives like Kace and I’s texts or at Paul and my home. Both examples struck me as a little odd.
Classical music, privilege, and ghosts of the French Revolution
The word privilege is a lightning rod in United States culture. For some, it indexes systemic inequities shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, while for others, it represents a “woke” vocabulary used to enforce political correctness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, accusations of privilege have reached the classical music world.
Are all our fingers toes?
The etymology of finger is debatable, and toe fares only a bit better.
Hong Kong 2022: one country, two systems? [podcast]
The first of July 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It also marks the halfway point of a 50-year agreement between China and Hong Kong that established the “one country, two systems,” rule – a system designed to allow Hong Kong to “enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs” while still remaining a Special Administrative Region of China.
Recalling hymn tunes by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Hymn tunes of Ralph Vaughan Williams find consensus: undisputed quality. The foremost English composer of his generation is credited with composing, adapting, or arranging more than 80 tunes set to important hymns of our faith.
The perennial problem of succession [long read]
These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself emphatically into a world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable ‘political’ system”, writes Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, his seminal book on the origins of modern nationalism. But this was the world a large majority of all Europeans lived in before the French Revolution and in many cases up until the First World War.
Almost “nothing”: why did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead to war?
Shot through the neck, choking on his own blood with his beloved wife dying beside him, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, managed a few words before losing consciousness: “It’s nothing,” he repeatedly said of his fatal wound. It was 28 June 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.