Author Archives: Stephen

Intelligent life: Isaiah Berlin

Posted on 18 November 2022 by Stephen

Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Part-time talking

Posted on 26 October 2022 by Stephen

Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can churn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Passing the Baton

Posted on 18 September 2022 by Stephen

“The Queen is dead; long live the King!” is such a cliché of stories and films that it was surprising to hear it for real. Not that we did hear it for real. The secrecy surrounding the Queen’s final hours … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment – the Decision

Posted on 31 August 2022 by Stephen

Reader, I bought a Brompton. After all my research – and a considerable amount of humming and haa-ing – I finally took Henry’s advice and went to my local bike shop to test-ride a couple of different eBike models. The … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment

Posted on 31 July 2022 by Stephen

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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To the sea

Posted on 18 July 2022 by Stephen

With emails running alongside for the first part, barking for attention, we beat a retreat from London. The clamour of work was soon swamped by the heat and light and sights and sounds and smells of Barcelona, and by the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Message for my reader

Posted on 10 July 2022 by Stephen

For the longest time I have been meaning to get back to—ugh!—blogging. Regular readers, should any remain, will see that this is the first post of 2022. I haven’t broken any promises with the hiatus and have no excuses to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Books of the Year

Posted on 31 December 2021 by Stephen

One final look back before I turn to face 2022. Following a practice started last year, I have maintained a thread of tweet-sized reviews of the books that I read in 2021 – all of them. There are only eighteen in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Photographs of 2021

Posted on 30 December 2021 by Stephen

Continuing the theme of gently exercising the writing muscle by composing posts made mostly of pictures, I present here the round-up of what I think are the best photographs that I took in the past year. 2021 has been a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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In the garden

Posted on 27 December 2021 by Stephen

What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect is may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms that bore through repetition. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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