Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Michael Hunt
Critics of the Obama administration’s Syrian policy have lamented its failure to take into account regional realities. With surprising speed those realities have put the brakes on US intervention. The anti-regime forces in Syria have remained deeply divided — indeed turned violently against each other — and resistant to outside guidance.
By Carsten Stahn
The Syria crisis has challenged the boundaries of international law. The concept of the ‘red line’ was used to justify military intervention in response to the use of chemical weapons. This phenomenon reflects a trend to use law as a strategic asset or instrument of warfare (‘lawfare’).
By Trevor Bryce
I have long been fascinated with Syria. Like other Middle Eastern regions, it has many layers of civilization and has seen many conquerors and raiders tramp and gallop through its lands over the centuries. That of course has been the fate of lots of countries, ancient and modern.
By Patricia Seed
Miniature icebergs that would fit in the palm of my hand float along the water’s edge, but the air is cold enough to resist the impulse to crouch down and remove my gloves to pick them up. Looking up across the glass-like surface, I spot hundreds of similar chunks like pieces of frozen vanilla popsicle that have fallen just out of reach.
By Alice Northover
One of the great advantages of being OUPblog editor is that I read practically everything that was published on the blog in 2012: the 1,088 articles, Q&As, quizzes, slideshows, podcasts, videos, and more from the smartest minds in the scholarly world. When I first attempted the list, I had 30 articles bookmarked and I’d only made it six months back. I’m sure I’ll hate myself for missing a piece tomorrow.
By Marilyn Deegan
The new discoveries of the Mars rover Curiosity have greatly excited the world in the last few weeks, and speculation was rife about whether some evidence of life has been found. (In actuality, Curiosity discovered complex chemistry, including organic compounds, in a Martian soil analysis.) Why the excitement?
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.
By Kyle Gann
By long tradition, sweet Venus and mystical Neptune are the planets astrologically connected with music. The relevance of Mars, “the bringer of war” as one famous composition has it, would seem to be pretty oblique. Mars in the horoscope has to do with action, ego, how we separate ourselves off from the world; it is “the fighting principle for the Sun,” in the words of famous astrologer Liz Greene.
What Rebecca has been reading.
It’s coming…
Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest European writer on the arts. The architect Sir John Soane admired his essay on Egyptian architecture while Hegel considered his research on ancient Greek polychromatic sculpture a masterpiece. Despite the breadth of Quatremère’s writings, today he is famous for inventing an idea […]
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.
‘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.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.
Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together.
How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope.