Having spent decades of my life teaching at universities, I was dismayed to read that UniversitiesUK (the body of heads of universities) had been minded to find that segregated seating at a lecture or event was OK. It isn’t, and I have lectured at Gresham College about how supine UUK is in the face of…
I was one of the (many) people who was privileged to have a brief meeting or two with Nelson Mandela in his lifetime. In my case it was because I was, for a while, a trustee of the Rhodes Scholarships and of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. The Mandela Rhodes Foundation was established in 2003 as a…
The personal, not the political. The stream of newspaper supplements, plays, documentaries, is upsetting me even more than it did at the time. Like everyone else, I remember the moment well. I was at a party at Oxford, which broke up as the news came through. A fellow student invited me back to his room…
The Royal Charter on Press Regulation has been signed off by the Queen on the advice of the Privy Council. Members of the public probably think that when the Queen in Privy Council is considering a new Charter, she sits with the wisest men and women of the realm, deliberating, drafting, listening to the pros…
This is more or less what I said during the debate this morning on the Equality (Titles) Bill, which aims to extend gender equality to titles and to husbands of lady peers:- We in this House are very ready to impose equality obligations on others, and must be equally ready to accept them ourselves. The…
