On Monday night, Arsenal scored one of the loveliest goals I’ve ever seen. And I say Arsenal, not Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, because practically the entire side made it: a team of specialists contributing to a sublime whole. I work with specialists. Universities are full of them. Not one of them has a right foot like Aubameyang’s …
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 …