I had to go into the Ashmolean Museum Reserve Collections yesterday, to choose some objects to teach with next term. Now this is mostly very good. First of all, without giving away any crucial security secrets, the reserves are in a deep, dark basement, so it was relatively cool. And second, museum reserves are fundamentally …
Once upon a time, I went to watch my son Silas play lacrosse. Afterwards, as I stopped to put on a jumper, I took off my glasses and put them on the roof of the car. Now driving is pretty much the only thing I can do without glasses. So, I drove. I remembered, of …
Professors Abigail Williams and Adam Smyth of the Oxford English Faculty teach a course to third year undergraduates called Texts in Motion, about the material forms of books and the ways they circulate. Some years ago, they asked me to gather some material for a class in the Museum to help their students think about …
One of the pleasures of returning to work at the museum last week (and there have to be pleasures in returning to work otherwise we’ll all go crazy) was to be surrounded again by its many treasures: pictures, sculptures, textiles shimmering with gold and silver thread, ceramics of miraculous delicacy. It is a daily treat …
Just now there’s an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, where I work, called 'Storms War and Shipwrecks’. It’s terrific, full of ancient treasures from the bottom of the sea around Sicily, but I feel slightly wistful whenever I arrive at work and see the posters for it, because it seems to sum up all the …
One of the best things about my job is meeting experts. The Ashmolean Museum where I work is full of them, and so is the rest of Oxford. The people I teach with are specialists - in history, modern languages, theology, classics, neuroscience, geography, literature and all sorts of other things – and they seem …
As you’ve probably heard, over Easter they switched on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland again, hoping to find out something more about the ‘dark matter’ that seems to make up 96% of the mass of the universe. Like most people, I can’t begin to contemplate the complexity of the questions that are …
About four hundred years ago, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei was starting to understand, along with others throughout Europe, something of the way the universe works. The earth, it seemed, was not at its centre, but travelled around the sun, along with the other planets. These new discoveries didn't sit well with the church, which …