History and Today

 Link to Tim Hitchcock's excellent blog on assessing grant applications: Historyonics: The Conundrums of Assessment : "To my chagrin I recently realised that I have been assessing research proposals and grant applications for some twenty years, and have done ..."

Found this Times editorial (25 April 1970) in a second hand copy of E.P. Thompson, Warwick University Ltd (Penguin, 1970).   Somewhat apposite, 40 years later. 

I wish British society respected learning and knowledge for the good of humanity rather than for the free market. University = universality. We study and teach at university to engage with higher goals of civilisation rather than just being consumers of (and indeed products of) a commercial machine. A country that doesn't know its own history, its own literature, its own identities, is going to be poorer, no matter how much more economic 'product' we make. After we're dead money is useless, but words and deeds can last forever.