Latest posts

Has ‘The Rising Tide’ of Women Risen?

Posted on 11 January 2026 by Athene Donald

Last December a new Government taskforce was launched to address issues about Women in Tech. Led by the Secretary of State at DSIT, Liz Kendall, with Anne-Marie Imafidon alongside, the aim is to ensure women will be better supported to enter, stay and lead in the UK’s tech sector. There is a long way to go. The Government press release cites a 2023 Fawcett Society Report which stated that 1 in 5 men working in tech roles believe that women are naturally less suited to working in the sector. Given potential male colleagues like that, why would women want to join the sector? Yet, the case for diversity in tech has been made many times, and losing women from the talent pool can only harm the nation and its decision-making. Who will worry about algorithmic bias or the dangers of stereotyping assumed within an LLM – by race, gender or any other characteristic? Who will think about female health concerns when setting up a new enterprise or be aware of the different products a diverse population might want? These are all topics I’ve written about before (see this policy brief I wrote last year).

Issues about the shortage of women in these arenas are not new, even if what ‘tech’ is may have moved on from the 90’s. Back then, Nancy Lane Perham – who died in November – led a group charged with looking into this issue on the back of William Waldegrave’s 1993 Realising Our Potential Report about the state of UK Science, Engineering and Technology (SET as it was called then, as opposed to the more modern STEM); her report was called The Rising Tide. I well remember the publication of the Waldegrave report (indeed he visited the Cavendish Laboratory during his time as Science minister, and we were very conscious of the hideous plastic buckets in my own lab designed to catch the leaks; it wasn’t necessarily the professional look we wanted to give). But reading it now does show how the world of women in STEM has and hasn’t moved on.

For instance, I was startled to read in the Waldegrave report that changes to the school curriculum will

‘ensure for the first time that all pupils, girls as well as boys, will study a broad and balance programme of science and technology right through to the age of 16.’

That it was necessary a decent science curriculum should be made available to girls as well as boys seems rather shocking now: this is an area where attitudes have certainly changed. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that girls may still be put off pursuing STEM subjects post-16 by attitudes from peers, parents and teachers, however talented they are. The presumption that computing and engineering are not for the female sex remains strong. As the Waldegrave report also made clear in the 1990’s,

‘Women are the country’s biggest single most under-valued and therefore under-used human resource’, with a ‘widespread waste of talent and training, throughout industry and academia, due to the absence of women.’

More than thirty years later, and we are still facing the same challenge.

Sadly, I have not been able to find Nancy Lane-Perham’s Report on the web. I probably once had a hard copy, but if I did it was thrown out when I vacated my office. I do have the successor report SET Fair on my computer, as well as still being able to find it on the web. Nancy was still associated with this, although Susan Greenfield chaired the report and it was often known as the Greenfield Report. Nancy was an absolute pioneer in raising these issues, actions that led nationally in due course to the creation of Athena SWAN (Senior Women in Academia Network) and ultimately the Athena SWAN Charter. In Cambridge Nancy spearheaded the formation of WiSETI, the Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, a programme that I assumed the leadership of when Nancy stepped down. By then I had known Nancy for many years: she was my graduate tutor at Girton (not that I had much interaction with her, although I suspect she organised a few end-of-year receptions where we mingled).

I was very conscious, when I assumed the role with WiSETI, that I, as a professor and an FRS, found it easier to get access to the senior leadership in the University than Nancy had. She never held a substantive post within the formal University structure, although she continued to do research throughout her life, funded by so-called soft money. This challenge she faced locally seemed particularly unreasonable given her external standing: she was, for instance, a non-executive director for one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and was honoured with several honorary degrees. I fear this casual attitude towards her by the local ‘establishment’ was exacerbated by the fact she was married to the biochemist Richard Perham and was too often seen as Richard’s wife rather than a scientist in her own right. When Richard became Master of St John’s College, this role as the Master’s wife probably further buried her own talents as a serious scientist. In some ways, therefore, her life story can be seen as typical of too many women, whose strengths are too often overlooked because they are ‘merely’ a woman, or someone’s wife.

Nancy was a woman whose energy was formidable, and who would continue to come to the annual WiSETI lectures, and check that I was keeping up the good fight locally long after she had retired. I have been thinking a lot about her life and work recently, after hearing the sad news of her recent deat. It therefore seems fitting to reflect on what has and hasn’t changed since she produced her ‘90’s report. Undoubtedly the numbers of senior women have increased, yet many will still be feeling they may be ‘othered’ or overlooked amidst a sea of white males. It is encouraging to see the Government’s initiative around the women in tech situation, but there is no point in only looking at the state of the workforce. We have to consider the messaging right back to the early years of children’s lives, to ensure the pipeline into tech is as diverse as possible, removing outdated messaging and stereotypes from the school. I am sure Nancy would hope her legacy will continue to have impact on both the young and more mature.

 

Posted in bias, education, Nancy Lane Perham, Women in science, Women in tech | Comments Off on Has ‘The Rising Tide’ of Women Risen?

A Quiet Light

Posted on 10 January 2026 by Stephen

The webpage of the Dulwich Picture Gallery describing the exhibition, which contains a portion of her painting "Sunlight in the Blue Room" that is described in the text.

I read recently – I can’t remember where – that people who say “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” actually do know quite a bit about art. More than average at any rate. I think this may well be true. Although I would classify myself as someone who doesn’t know much about art, I have been going to galleries since my parents dragged me as a child around the Louvre and the Uffizi, and I have for a long time now gone of my own accord to galleries, sometimes with reluctant children in tow, here in London and in most of the foreign cities I have been lucky enough to visit.

I still don’t know very much about techniques, or schools, or movements, but I do know what I like –  realism, impressionism, some abstract stuff, Velasquez, Holbein, Turner, Caravaggio, Dürer, Jack B Yeats, for example – and what I’m not so keen on, which includes a lot of surrealist works, medieval art, and some abstract stuff. I’m confident enough to know that it’s OK not to like works that others have pronounced to be masterpieces and to just spend time in galleries with the pieces that catch my attention. 

In a tube station last November my attention was caught by a poster advertising an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery of the works of Danish artist Anna Ancher called “Painting Light”. The poster showed a fragment one of her signature works (Sunlight in the Blue Room) which depicts a blond girl in a blue dress facing away from the viewer, her hair shining in the sunlight that streams in from the window to her left and a casts a bright trapezium on the blue wall in front of her. 

I can’t put into words what exactly I found so captivating about that image and sent me to Dulwich a couple of week later, but I think it was mainly the light. 

I had never heard of Ancher before. She is well known in her native Denmark but this is her first exhibition in the UK. Born in the late 19th Century Ancher lived and worked in Skagen, a small fishing town at the northernmost tip of Denmark. Many of her paintings, or at least the selection on display in Dulwich, depict domestic scenes in her own home and in the homes of some of her poorer neighbours.

Ancher's painting of "Interior with poppies and reading woman". A woman sits facing the viewer on a yellow-gold sofa, her right elbow on the table, hand supporting her head, reading a book. Also on the table is a vase of red poppies. Splashes of light can be seen on the sofa and chair at the left hand side of the table.

Interior with poppies and reading woman

The exhibition is of a modest size, just four rooms containing, if memory serves, about fifty paintings in all. That’s a good size I found, since you have time to see everything and then go back to the ones that have made the deepest impression. Looking back at the eleven works that I took pictures of with my iPhone, all but two are of people in their houses, none of them looking at the viewer. Instead they all look down, either focused on the task at hand – washing, sewing, eating, reading – or lost in their own thoughts. I only noticed this afterwards but the lack of any direct engagement with the viewer makes you the unseen observer of quiet moments. In most of the pictures I photographed there is only a single figure, but even in those works that contain two or three people, they are together but not conversing with one another. Although the paintings are therefore imbued with a sense of solitariness, the light brings a warmth that keeps melancholy at bay.

A woman in a blue top and long red skirt stands, facing away from the viewer at a sink, in front of a curtained window which is rendered yellow by the sunlight.

The Maid in the Kitchen

In the days and weeks after I had been to the exhibition, I found that I kept returning to the photos I had taken. The luminous qualities of Ancher’s paintings are both literal and metaphorical. It struck me that the ordinariness of many of the compositions is at times deceptive, as in The Maid in the Kitchen shown above. The delicacy of the light surrounding and illuminating the figures in the paintings enhances the tranquility of these domestic scenes, conferring an etherial beauty that, at the risk of over-romanticising the work, surfaced for me the deep mysteriousness of our existence, something that we tend to forget amid our everyday cares.

My favourite Ancher painting in the exhibition was At The Meal. It’s a small picture, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, that shows a middle-aged couple sitting at a little table. The wife, in a black headscarf, faces forward, her features illuminated by the weak light coming from the window on the right. Her hands are clasped, possibly to say grace, and her eyes are cast down, not looking at her husband, who faces away from the viewer and is mostly in shadow. 

Ancher's painting "At the meal" which is described in the text of the blogpost.

Ancher – At the meal

The light is a little colder than in most of the other works on show. But there is still a warmth in the muted brown tones of the scene of two people who have been together for a long time. They may not have much – the furnishings are sparse and there is only a small amount of food on the table – but they have each other. The word that sprang to mind when I first saw this painting was companionable. 

I suspect At The Meal resonated with me because my own life is now more muted, the noise and colour of a busy academic schedule having been replaced by the homely routine of caring for my wife, who is living with a physically debilitating neurological condition. I recognise the quiet light of the painting, the moments of unspoken togetherness, in my own day-to-day living. Our situation is hard, sad even at times. Horizons that once spread across the world are now largely contained within just a couple of rooms of our house. But there is still great contentment to be had, living quietly and companionably. 

The consolation I found in Ancher’s paintings reminded me of Vermeer’s The Little Street, which the philosopher Alain de Botton has suggested to be emblematic of more ordinary measures of success than the unrealistic expectations that we too often foist unhappily and unhealthily upon ourselves. 

Vermeer's painting of The Little Steer shows a house front and an alleyway. A woman sits possibly sewing in the doorway. In the alley, another woman bends over at a task. Image taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Street

Vermeer’s The Little Street

The importance of quiet, everyday accomplishments is also central to George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, which I was in the midst of reading when I went to the Ancher exhibition. Its closing lines, summarising the life of the main character, Dorothea, are all of a piece with the spirit of Ancher’s work and provide a salutary reminder, at a time when all hope of goodness and justice seems to be disappearing from the world, that we still have the capacity to shine a quiet light on the lives of those around us. 

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The exhibition Painting Light is on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 08 March 2026

 

 

Posted in science | Comments Off on A Quiet Light

My Top Reads of 2025

Posted on 1 January 2026 by Henry Gee

In 2025, as the century closed its first quarter (where has the time gone?)  I read (and listened to) 70-ish books, though the precise number rather depends on how one counts things. Mick Herron’s nine-novel Slough House sequence is really a single soap opera, for example, and one or two things have been audio-only specials. No fewer less fewer than 47 titles were consumed read listened to as audiobooks. There has been much recent fuss and flapdoodle about the decline in reading for pleasure, but does listening to an audiobook detract from this? The fact is that I read for work (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company) so the last thing I want to do out of hours is read some more. And I have to have something to listen to while walking the dogs.

The accent this year seems to have been on fantasy and horror, possibly encouraged by The Winter Spirits (reviewed here), an anthology of universally marvellous weird tales by authors of whom I had never heard. Nothing like an anthology to diversify your reading. Partly because of this, many of the books read consumed listened to … er … grokked this year were excellent and I have had to make some hard choices. I had to omit Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke –each superb in its own way — on the grounds that I had read them before, and The Half-Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley because there was another (even better) book by the same author on the list. Also, Things in Jars by Jess Kidd.

To be included on this list I both have had to have enjoyed it, and it has to be memorable. To offset the Pull of the Recent (I might remember books I read most recently) I find that I forget some books I’ve enjoyed hugely as soon as I close the covers, whereas others I’ve read long ago stay in the mind.

So here, as ever, are my ten best reads of 2025, in no particular order as the say on the game shows, with my top pick at the end.

Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly.

Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying Atomkraft Nein Danke pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic. Oh, how we laughed on the way to the homeopathy clinic.

Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt,  and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded, as is later BBC revisionism. It wasn’t a desire for diversity in the BBC that caused the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, to be directed by a gay Asian or produced by a Jewish woman, but the reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity,

Mark Rowlands: The Happiness of Dogs In which a professional philosopher and avocational Dog Person takes issue with the Socratic ideal that only the examined life is worth living. In the course of his exploration (and I use the word course advisedly, because one acquires in reading this book a great deal of knowledge about the current thinking on matters such as morality, motivation, sentience and so on) Rowlands shows that dogs, lacking the human ability to reflect upon themselves and their place in the world, have a more fulfilled life. It is the unexamined life, contra Socrates, that is worth living. Humans sometimes achieve a nirvanic state in which they can fleetingly ‘lose themselves’ , if, for example, they are playing sport; indulging in some hobby or activity that they love. Dogs, though, find themselves in this state as a matter of course, and can do things routinely that many humans struggle to achieve even for a moment, such as full, honest love and commitment. So pupperino, so prelapsarian, and who, really, is the better off?

Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney The devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.

Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery concerns social-care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish.  Maud is Irish and also psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised  (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional.

Florence Knapp The Names In the aftermath of the Great Storm of 1987, Cora, ex-ballerina and mother of two, is on her way to register the name of her newborn son. But what should she call him? Her husband insists that he be Gordon — his own name, and that of his father. She, in contrast, prefers Julian. Her nine-year-old daughter Maia favours Bear. What follows is a three-way sliding-doors novel exploring the consequences of each of these choices. It sounds fun and fluffy, but it’s not. If like me you are appalled by the very thought of domestic violence (and how common it is) then this will be a difficult if excellent read.

Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies This is the best book I wish I had never read. It argues that we’ll all be wiped out by Artificial Intelligence (AI).  At the core of the AI issue is something called the Alignment Problem. That is, the task of developing an AI with goals that align with our own. This, however, is hard, because AIs are not crafted, but grown. AIs are computer programs that take inputs (vast quantities of information) and outputs (language, speech, solutions to scientific problems, and so on) separated by many layers of processing whose parameters can be tweaked by training the AI to provide the desired outcome. There may be trillions of  parameters in the many layers of the AI opera cake, and during each training run they are modified by ‘weights’, of which there are also many trillions. It is beyond the capacity of mere human beings to catalogue all the parameters and weights, and impossible to understand the relationship between the input, the changing combination of parameters and weights, and the output. This situation is absolutely ripe for unintended consequences. One might, for example, design an AI to elicit happy and satisfied responses from human participants (customers, friends on social media, business contacts). These responses feed back into the AI, which might seek to elicit happy outcomes from anything, irrespective of whether it is human. It might, for example, be happier when fed random strings of rubbish. In which case human involvement becomes irrelevant. There are already examples of AIs that exhibit unanticipated or ‘weird’ behaviour. In some circumstances, AIs give the results users want to hear, even if the advice is illogical or even dangerous.

Screenshot 2025-11-01 at 10.24.45

A dangerously sycophantic AI. Recently.

There are increasing reports of AIs that cheat, lie, blackmail, deliberately underperform, and even (in one laboratory test) plot the murder of a human being that wishes to turn them off. It is no great leap, then, to imagine the creation of an AI capable of subverting human intentions entirely to the extent that humanity is driven to extinction.

The authors are coy about how this might happen (though they do offer some scenarios). End results, they say, may be inevitable, even if the precise path towards that end is unpredictable. For example, if you play chess against Stockfish, currently the world’s best chess program, you will almost certainly lose, though the precise moves you and Stockfish make are not predictable. So, extinction might start with a perfect storm of factors, including blackmail, extortion and espionage, and progress to the kinds of massive cyber-attacks that corporations are experiencing with increasing frequency (causing a great deal of human disruption and hardship). It’s not hard to imagine the disruption a rogue AI could do to power grids, air-traffic control, banking systems and so on in our increasingly networked, fragile and non-linear world, and, with a little imagination, biological laboratories. Would an AI need a human catspaw for things like this? Not necessarily — it would be easy to imagine a video call in which the research director of a lab asks their scientists to create certain chemicals or strings of DNA or contagious viruses, but the research director is in fact an AI-generated deepfake. All this should be quite enough to give anyone the willies, but Yudkowsky and Soares go overboard here (and so damage their credibility to those of us not used to apocalyptic SF)  with invocations of AIs boiling away the Earth’s oceans and strip-mining the Solar System for energy and computational substrate, before heading off into the Galaxy.

The authors compare AI development to nuclear weapons, and advocate the kinds of treaties and safeguards that have kept the world from nuclear war, including regular inspection, legal sanction, and even use of military force to bomb rogue data centres.

There are alternative views, however. Some think that the risks posed by AI are overhyped. Others feel that although AIs might indeed do a lot of damage, it might not be quite as apocalyptic as Yudkowsky and Soares claim. There are many precedents for techno-doom that never came to pass. Back in the 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to famine and civilisational threat within a decade. In the 1990s, nanotechnology was going to create self-replicating nanobots that would turn everything into grey goo. The turn of the year 2000 didn’t witness devastation wrought by a Millennium Bug. Yudkowsky and Soares’ book seems very much in that Doom-Scrolling tradition. It has the same febrile, heightened tone as Ehrlich’s, even closing with a plea to protest, and lobby elected representatives. This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong of course. In the end, the boy who cried ‘wolf’ was right.

And top of this list by a country mile, and my Top Read of 2025, is

Natasha Pulley: The Mars House January is the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in London. Climate change drives him to the colony of Tharsis, on Mars, as a refugee. But refugees from Earth, having three times the strength of a naturalised Martian, have to be confined in body-cages that ramp down their strength so they won’t injure Martians by accident, and have to work in dirty, heavy jobs. January is a labourer in Tharsis’ water factory. By chance he meets Senator Aubrey Gale, a politician on the make, and — one thing leading to another — he ends up as their official consort. After that he gets sucked in to a grand political intrigue. Tharsis is sponsored by China, but is growing apart from it. Tharsese is a strange mixture of Mandarin with Russian and English (there is a lot of interesting exposition on language). The tensions between Mars and Earth throw Aubrey and January into a deadly Great Game. The science is okay, but what’s key here is the social mores of Mars. Martians have abolished gender, so they are all ‘they’  and androgynous. Separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ genders are only for animals. What stands out is Pulley’s style, which is gentle, bright, breezy, witty, affectionate and very funny, clothing a well-realised future with a cuddly trans-non-binary-genderfluid bromance at its heart. Essential.

Comments Off on My Top Reads of 2025

What I Read In December

Posted on 1 January 2026 by Henry Gee

Blake Crouch Dark Matter Jason Desson used to be the most promising physicist of his generation, but lack of funds meant that he couldn’t make progress on his efforts to quantumly entangle more atoms than existed in a tiny dot, and he now teaches at a community college. He gave it all up for love — to a wonderful artist, who trades her talent for quiet domesticity. Until he is kidnapped on a dark street and transported to an alternate reality where his promise has been realised. This sci-fi thriller charts his efforts to get back home. Except that many other iterations of himself are trying to do the same. I found myself enjoying this immensely. As well as being a great story, with amazing twists and turns, it made me think about roads not taken, and whether one should just be happy with one’s lot. The downside is that a month later I couldn’t remember a thing about it and had to find a plot synopsis online to jog my memory. Reality is something only ever experienced in the moment. As a wise person once said: you are where you are. Your luggage is another story.

Mick Herron Down Cemetery Road Enthused as I was by this author’s Slough House sequence of novels (reviewed last month) I turned to one of his novels featuring sleuth Zoë Boehm. In this story, bored housewife Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a small child seemingly orphaned when the house the child lives in explodes. Sarah is sucked down into a web of intrigue, the denouement of which I cannot now recall. It was a pleasant enough plot but the exposition was desperately slow and the feisty Ms Boehm makes only fleeting appearances here and there. I do not think I’ll bother with another.

Robert W Chambers The King In Yellow A collection of five horror tales from the eye-stretchingly aestheticist and slightly barmy 1890s. Think of  what might result had H. P. Lovecraft tackled The Picture of Dorian Gray. The tales are each different in setting but all feature, at one time or another, the titular play, the reading of which drives people mad.  Haunting.

Tom Holland Rubicon Having met the author at a recent literary event and apologising for not having read any of his books, I asked which of his he would recommend, and Rubicon was the answer. It’s the ripping yarn (these days we’d call such things ‘narrative history’) of the Roman Republic, especially its final years, from about 100 BCE until the reign of Augustus. As the Republic expanded from a city state to encompass the entire Mediterranean basin, its ethic of horny-handed asceticism and upstanding republicanism was increasingly challenged by its imperial situation. Increasing civil unrest led to an exhausted populace welcoming benign dictatorship, which culminated in the absolute rule of Octavian, the last man standing after several bruising and bloody civil wars. Octavian became Augustus, nowadays regarded as the first Roman Emperor, though back in the day he was seen more as a Consul-for-Life. The later Roman Republic is one of the best documented of any period of antiquity and had more than its fair share of colourful characters, all of which we meet here. Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Mithridates, Cato, Hannibal. Mark Antony and their friends and enemies shine forth. Not many women, though — but the magnetic character of Cleopatra (seventh of her name) goes a long way to make up for the deficit, all on her own.

E F. Benson E. F. Benson’s Ghost Stories I was reminded of Benson from a series of televisual emissions in which Mark Gattiss (The League of Gentlemen, Dr Who, Sherlock)  had adapted a number of classic ghost stories for broadcast over Christmas, one of which was Benson’s The Room in the Tower. I came across this selection on Audible, read by Gattiss himself,  whose deadpan delivery only enhances the creepy atmosphere. Benson had learned the craft at his mentor’s knee — literally, as he’d been one of the small boys to whom ghost stories were read by the master of such things, M. R. James. The Room In The Tower is one of the selections (though to be honest I preferred Gattiss’s TV adaptation) . All the stories are set in an idyllic no-time of Late Victorian or Edwardian Middle-Class prosperity, of luncheon parties and tea served on the lawn, as if P. G. Wodehouse had discovered Something Nasty In The Woodshed. Perhaps we’d call such a genre ‘Cosy Horror’. I was familiar with one or two of the stories, notably Negotium Perambulans, and note that some are more horrific than ghostly. No fewer than three feature giant slug-like creatures that suck the life out of their victims. Freud would have had a field day.

Posted in Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In December

OBITUARY: Midnight ‘Naughtypants’ Ginsberg (2008-2026)

Posted on 1 January 2026 by Henry Gee

IMG_9247Also known as ‘Mr N. Pants of Cromer’, Mr Ginsberg died in the early hours of New Year’s Day. He was 17. Discovered as a stray in the garden at about six months old, and despite having been taught company manners by a tolerant golden retriever, he remained fairly feral to the end of his days. Until his recent retirement he would occasionally deposit whole dead rats in one’s shoes. He is believed to have had several homes, and is known to have regularly helped an elderly neighbour three doors down watch Coronation Street. He remained perky and alert until near the end, having not lost any of his marbles, though, to be fair, he didn’t have very many to begin with. He is survived by three other cats, four dogs, two chickens, a royal python, two tropical fish and four humans, whose grief will be tempered by relief from mounting vet bills. May his memory be a blessing.

Comments Off on OBITUARY: Midnight ‘Naughtypants’ Ginsberg (2008-2026)

Books of 2025

Posted on 31 December 2025 by Stephen
Composite image of my posts on BlueSky, each with a very short review of a book

Micro-reviews of the first 12 books I read in 2025

My annual round-up of the books I read in 2025 was pre-empted by a request from Research Professional News (RPN) to write 250 words on my favourite reads of the past year. The article, which includes selections by others, is for subscribers only but here is what I wrote (edited to straighten out some of the text’s original convolutions):

In a year in which the world appears to be going to hell in a hand cart travelling at the speed of a SpaceX rocket, I turned to two books to try to get a grip on the overwhelming immiseration of politics at home and abroad. Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers: The people who turn lies into reality provided a penetrating analysis of how influencers and propagandists have worked the attention economy of social media into a frenzy that daily perverts our public discourse. Sadly, her proffered solutions seem to me likely to fall short.

The far-right ethno-nationalists who have ridden to power on the toxic currents that sluice through these media channels were brilliantly unmasked in Quinn Solobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. They are, it turns out, a highly organised but motley crew of thinkers and philanthropists who have wrapped themselves in the threadbare, foul-smelling rags of scientific racism to proselytise for a socioeconomic vision rooted in division. I was left with a visceral sense of just how much they despise the wealth and diversity of our collective humanity.

I found relief from these troubling vistas in Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found, a beautifully written and deeply soulful tale of losing her beloved father and finding the love of her life. It is a book that overflows with human kindness. As does Middlemarch, I have belatedly discovered. George Eliot’s compassionate masterpiece on the many and various foibles of beloved characters who leap vividly from the page surprised and delighted me time and again. With uncommon wit and wisdom she weaves a tale of provincial, everyday cares to articulate, in ways that still seem fresh after 150 years, profound and moving insights into the human condition. I am indebted to this nineteenth century writer for resurrecting my hopes for twenty-first.

As is my long-standing habit, I also briefly reviewed each book in a BlueSky post as soon as I’d finished it.  You can click on the composite images of these posts to see higher resolution versions, or look up the year-long thread starting from here.

Composite image of my posts on BlueSky, each with a very short review of a book

Micro-reviews on BlueSky of my reading in the 2nd half of 2025

 

As you will see if you read the whole thread, apart from the four titles I highlighted for RPN, it was another mixed year. On the novel front I really enjoyed Laurent Binet’s intriguingly structured HHhH about the assassination in Prague in 1942 of the high-ranking Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, and the exploits of Dashiel Hammett’s gloriously cynical Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a character immortalised by Humphrey Bogart in the film of the book.

Colm Toibin’s Long Island memorably and movingly picked up the threads from Brooklyn twenty or so years later to tell the story of the loves and losses of Eilis Lacey, who has made her life in America but still feels the tug of her fraying ties to Ireland. To this Irish ear it resounded with the familiar ache of the emigrant.

Otherwise I was mostly disappointed with novels that others have found enchanting. I couldn’t finish Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, while Anne Cleeves’ Raven Black and Robert Harris’s Imperium both left me cold. I also failed to connect with Ursula Le Guin’s masterwork The Dispossessed. The faults here are partly my own, particularly in the case of Le Guin, I suspect.

Non-fiction titles that have stayed with me, apart from the two mentioned above, include Angus Hanton’s eye-opening but depressing Vassal State, an account of how the British economy has become a dependency of the USA, and James Baldwin’s collection of writings in The Cross of Redemption, which gave such a blistering insight into the state of that benighted country.

All in all not a bad year – enough reward to make me want to carry on. I am already enjoying the first book that I will finish in 2026, Matthew Cobb’s brand new biography of Francis Crick.

Happy new year dear reader!

Posted in science | Comments Off on Books of 2025

Photos of 2025

Posted on 28 December 2025 by Stephen
Green parakeets gathered on a bird feeder with the golden leaves of a tree in autumn behind

Green and gold of autumn

My annual selection of favourites from the photographs I took in the past year is now available on Flickr. Do people still use Flickr?

I have broken my usual rule of not including family photos because of the very exceptional and very happy occurrences of both of our daughters’ weddings this year. It would have felt wrong somehow to omit pictures that captured the sheer joy of these events.

Otherwise, I have travelled even less this year than last, so more of the pictures are closer to home. Most are at home or in and around the great city of London, which never fails to offer new surprises.

Enjoy, I hope.

Collections from previous years are available for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Black and white photograph taken through the window of people in a cafe all looking at their laptops or phones

Connected

Photo of the tall. angular glass Shard reflected in a puddle by the kerb

Shard reflection

Black and white photograph of a partial eclipse of the sun - a segment missing from the top right of the solar globe

Partial eclipse

Shot from Green Park of the pale stone facade of Buckingham Palace, with silhouetted people and trees in front.

Park and palace

A silver colander full of just-washed red and yellow plums, glistening with water droplets

Plum centre

 

Posted in science | Comments Off on Photos of 2025

In which we pause

Posted on 27 December 2025 by Jennifer Rohn

snowdrops blooming on grass

Silent night.

Well, not really night anymore, as I first opened this page at 4 AM. Out the window brittle stars burn, though the faintest of glows already encroaches. That limbo before morning, when the house is utterly silent, the central heating’s hum not yet kicked in. Even the chatty robins still sleep, and no cars or planes rumble past. After three days of windstorms, the air too is completely still: no branches shushing or chimes tinkling. I could be the only person awake in the entire world, driven to this state by the bad cold that befell me, typically, on my first full day off work.

It is also that limbo between Christmas and New Year, when everything has dried up: work emails, chatter from friends, even – thankfully – the guilty compulsion to chip away at academic chores. All that remains is your dear family, the larger world pushed away from its glowing, essential core. There is food to prepare, LEGO to assemble, hugs to enjoy, movies to watch, wrapping paper and cartons to recycle, long-postponed chores to consider: sweeping the last of the fallen leaves from the garden paths, for example, or tidying (once and for all) the loft. There are walks to take in the chill afternoons, muddy boots and untidy woods full of berries: holly, ivy, hawthorn, the remains of the sloe. There is the cold North Sea to be plunged into, while passers-by bundled in hats, scarves and gloves stare as if you are mad.

But reality will resume soon enough. The first snowdrops are already blooming in the village gardens and – along with the January crocuses pushing through the ragged lawn – the abandoned list of academic deadlines will soon once again become unavoidable.

Yet for now: silent night.

Comments Off on In which we pause

Behind the Nativity scenes

Posted on 23 December 2025 by Erika Cule

May the lord, when he comes, find us watching and waiting
From morning prayer in Advent

Working in a church as Christmas approaches means doing two jobs at once.

One task is to continue our walk through the liturgical year. Now is the season of Advent, metered out on Sundays with the lighting of candles on the Advent wreath. Familiar readings and themes tell of preparation, of gathering. Advent does not have the austerity of Lent. Nonetheless, liturgically at least, we are not rejoicing. Not yet. The Church of England liturgical book of the Seasons reminds us that

Decorating the church

Decorating the church.
via @stmaryhornseyrise on Instagram

The characteristic note of Advent is…expectation rather than penitence

then dryly understates

The anticipation of Christmas under commercial pressure has also made it harder to sustain the appropriate sense of alert watchfulness.

We as a staff team at St Mary’s Hornsey Rise try to sustain our alert watchfulness daily at Morning Prayer. There, the lectionary draws from the prophets and the readings speak of the yet-to-come. But the reality is, with Morning Prayer completed, we start work in a church building that has been decorated and ready for Christmas for some time. We fuel ourselves with coffee and leftover festive snacks, and switch gears.

The pressure is not only commercial. It is also practical. We will welcome many guests during the coming weeks. They will have expectations.

Who is this King of glory?
From Psalm 24

After Morning Prayer, our other task begins. The day gives way to school visits requiring us to retell the Nativity story. We host dozens of local school children and get everyone involved. We use coloured pens, Duplo bricks and a giant star made of tinfoil.

Decorating angels heralding a message of peace.

Decorating angels heralding a message of peace.

Building the Nativity scene out of Duplo.

Building the Nativity scene out of Duplo.

Follow the star.

Follow the star.
via @stmaryhornseyrise on Instagram

We hotfoot it up the hill to the local primary school to host our stand at their Christmas fair, distributing hot chocolate and flyers about our family church events.

Hot chocolate outreach.

Hot chocolate outreach with colleagues.

By the middle of the month we are preoccupied. We assemble Santa’s Grotto in the church hall and come together to write the script for the Christmas Eve Nativity.

Santa in his grotto at the Christmas fair.

Santa in his grotto at the Christmas fair.
via @stmaryhornseyrise on Instagram.

Our morning prayers become petitions for energy for ourselves as church workers. By this point we are flagging with the demands of the season.

We are unprepared for the coming of your Son

I have noticed a pattern. I am always a wreck at this time of year. I find Advent disconcerting. The cause, I think, is this splitting – between alert watchfulness and the already-here; a season of preparation in which I am required to be already prepared.

The Right Reverend Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, Bishop of Chelmsford, speaks of the liminality of Advent in The Times. She writes

Advent is a call to rejoice in the space of overlapping truths and realities, as we hold both the darkness of the world before Christ and the joyous light of His coming and salvation.

I find it hard to hold onto any space at all with a schedule this packed.

Fitting in some bellringing during Advent.

Fitting in some bellringing during Advent.

In early December we turn the church into a cinema and screen The Muppet Christmas Carol, serving hotdogs and popcorn.

A week before Christmas it unexpectedly fell to me to help prepare Christmas lunch for forty people. The Vicar left instructions, and departed to lead a funeral, with the rest of the staff team in tow. The deceased was a member of the church community whom I had never met; he was held before God. That day the overlapping truths and realities came sharply into focus. During the celebratory all-staff, all-volunteers, all-who-wants-one Christmas feast, we raised a toast to the deceased. Thanks to God for and from everyone. And presents for all.

Christmas presents for all.

Christmas presents for all.
via @stmaryhornseyrise on Instagram.

Discernment process update

During the summer, I completed multiple rounds of paperwork and meetings. I seem to have gotten through those stages just fine as in autumn I was assigned to a group with other candidates in the same situation. This group, led by two clergy, involved discussing different aspects of our experiences, faith and calling. The group sessions had two purposes: for candidates to become more comfortable talking about these topics, and to make sure we know what it is we are in for.

My astonishing takeaway from the group sessions is that despite my experience of calling having been sudden and my having been following Jesus for only a few years, in a group of other candidates I do not stand out as naive nor inexperienced. An immersive approach has paid off: working and worshipping in a number of churches since 2023 has given me a range of experiences to draw upon.

The group stage is complete. In the New Year I will be matched with a clergy person for some 1:1 meetings and ongoing discernment. In due course I will prepare for the first of two rounds of assessments.

See you next year.

Posted in Bellringing, Blogging by Candlelight, Christmas, discernment, Faith, Jesus, musings on life and death | Comments Off on Behind the Nativity scenes

Have We Had Enough of Experts?

Posted on 21 December 2025 by Athene Donald

Recently, my Cambridge colleagues Diane Coyle and Michael Kenny from the Bennett School of Public Policy took to the pages of Nature to write a cautionary Comment about the role of science and scientists in public policy. They are critical of those scientists who don’t pay attention to how to interact with policy-makers effectively, as opposed to simply baldly stating their views, data and/or evidence. Scientists must recognize, they say,

‘that the importance of science is not self-evident, and that part of the blame for the erosion of trust in science lies with scientists themselves.’

They go on to say:

‘In public policy, solutions to the problems society faces are rarely, if ever, purely technical. People’s values and interests often conflict, and scientific studies do not always provide direct answers to the questions that politicians and officials must grapple with, such as how to reduce crime rates or respond to a disease outbreak.’

There is nothing like working with policy-makers to ram this message home. As the saying goes ‘scientists advise and policy-makers decide’. Chairing science advisory committees, previously for DCMS and now for the Department for Education, clearly demonstrates to me any evidence that a scientist can bring to the table, however useful, correct and possibly even self-evident, can only inform. Many other factors, from ministerial direction to electoral acceptance, not to mention the fundamental issue of money, will need to be taken into account before any decision is made. But if we want the community of scientists to appreciate this, what action – other than writing in Nature – should be taken? If you are a PhD student, you may well be led to believe your thesis, all those results and the paper(s) you submit (and even see published) are the end of the story. In policy terms, that is not so.

Diane and Mike write of ‘science’ in the broadest sense (covered much more effectively by the German word Wissenschaft, as opposed to Naturwissenschaft; English does not have such a neat distinction), and I can really only talk as a ‘hard’ scientist, a natural philosopher if you like, not a social scientist, or indeed an engineer. But, although the details may vary, the basic issue is the same. Where, in training the scientists of tomorrow, do we introduce the idea that pure fact will not be sufficient to drive a policy. As it happens, a conversation with the head of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, Tim Minshall (he of the wonderful book, Your Life  is Manufactured), made very much the same point in a different context: the need to ensure a PhD thesis (from his field) considers not just the evidence, but  what impact it can and will have on (e.g) supply chains, scale-up or necessary skills.

In my field, the last chapter of a thesis is, typically, ‘suggestions for further work’. That covers no more than all those things the student might have wanted to do had they had another year or two of funding or the equipment had worked better, or indeed they had access to some other equipment. It would not typically address why the results had any bearing on our lives, potential government policy or saving money in production of some material. In my field, we don’t usually teach that stuff, but perhaps we should.

Turning briefly to a younger age group, the recent schools’ Curriculum and Assessment Review, with its mantra of ‘evolution not revolution’ remains wedded to standard assessments that focus on disciplinary facts, but does acknowledge there are other topics that need to be addressed, if not examined, within schools. One of these is climate change and sustainability – which one hopes has to cross disciplinary boundaries in the teaching – but a lot of material is to be crammed into (non-examinable) lessons in Citizenship and RSHE (Relationships and Sex Education, where issues around misogyny and toxic masculinity are likely to be touched upon, although I’ve already heard from some this is unlikely to be particularly productive).

In other words, in schools, some social issues will be taught but outside the main examinable curriculum, unless subject teachers find a way to bring them in. Should our university science departments be doing more of the same? It is obvious many, if not all, universities are running around trying to work out how to handle AI education and AI in education and assessment. But does every student get formally exposed to discussions around sustainability, for instance? I’m not sure they do. We don’t expect our students to be au fait with the environmental  challenges of extracting enough lithium from under the earth’s surface (be it from the Atacama Desert or China, which provoke different ecological issues) for the batteries we want for the energy transition, or to worry about the supply of rare-earth metals needed for our phones coming from fragile African states. As a physical scientist, all that is likely to be taught is how these components work.

Too often, we only teach facts that can be examined, not the issues that underlie those facts. We are unlikely to teach students to think about how to weigh up the pros and cons of the environmental plusses of moving towards a green economy reducing carbon emissions compared with the damage mining may do to a region. I’m aware many people reading this may think, well my department does, or that there is a specific ‘green energy’ module, but I fear too few actually discuss this wider context. Yet this is the context in which policy makers live, in which they have to weigh up pros and cons of any decision. These specific examples obviously come from the physical sciences, but one could raise the same sorts of questions in the life sciences.

Diane and Mike consider the impact of the growing polarisation of our society due to increasing inequality, the crude distinction between the haves and have-nots. They question whether the decisions – indeed the evidence – that ‘elite’ scientists seek and produce is, in itself, influenced by their status and not relevant to the more disadvantaged and that they may not listen to their views. That what counts as ‘evidence’ may need to be broadened to factor in what people know but which cannot easily be measured and quantified as well as their ‘tacit knowledge’. This is not a new idea (for instance, to give an early example, Brian Wynne has written a lot about this in the context of sheep farmers and the after effects of the Chernobyl disaster), but it is sadly easy to forget in many situations, although it won’t apply in all.

If we, as scientists, want our work to have impact in the way our society operates – be it about the mass take-up of vaccinations or achieving a just green energy transition – we all have work to do to think harder about how we communicate and contextualise what we do, and indeed which questions we ask. Every field will have different challenges in achieving this and it is not to say ‘pure’ curiosity driven research has no place. In our teaching, in our communications to the public (as opposed to within our own communities) we should remember the plea from Coyle and Kenney. We can each do our own bit to remind the wider world they really haven’t had enough of experts.

Posted in Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Communicating Science, Diane Coyle, education, Michael Kenny, Policy, Science Culture, Tim Minshall | Comments Off on Have We Had Enough of Experts?