I have not been sleeping well lately. This is not a problem with actually going to sleep. I am excellent at going to sleep. Along with ‘having warm hands’, going to sleep is one of my superpowers. I can go to sleep anywhere, any time; on a bus, on a train, sitting down, standing up. …
The future troubles me. I worry about all sorts of stuff. These are not global concerns. I’m good with the great shifts of human and planetary history. No. With me, it’s the little things. When I was waiting for my children to be born, I fretted over what we would call them, about whether they’d …
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I went out for dinner in Paris. I was in high spirits. Although it was a miserable, chilly, February evening, I was on holiday, I’d found free parking and to top it all, Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison (yes, this really was …
People say that, when they are lost, men are reluctant to ask directions. The reason people say this is because it is true. But we are never shy in offering them. I, for example, was in a museum recently and was asked, by an elderly couple, where they might find a particular painting. I immediately …
I woke up tired this morning. On Friday, I went to see my Dad in hospital, where he’s stuck with a bout of pneumonia, and then had supper with my Mum. On Saturday I saw some very old friends, sat around, sang, laughed a lot and went busking. My children showed up as if by …
I was cutting my hair last week. It helps that I have almost no hair to cut because having nothing to cut alleviates the problem of having zero expertise. However, I’ve been doing it for many years, with electric clippers, much as I imagine I might shear a sheep, and I’ve become fairly adept at …
My boys, Silas, Sam and Linus, play a lot of FIFA (other football-related computer games are available) and as a result our house is full of weird stats. We know the pace of Werder Bremen’s 20-year-old Gambian striker, Ousman Manneh. We know that Erhun Oztumer of Walsall has the best balance of just about any …
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 …
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 …