The Coalition’s plans for higher education rest upon an anachronistic view of learning, which separates the 'practical' sciences from the humanities, viewed as a financial drain with no earthly use. Chris Parton looks to emerging interdisciplinary and conscilient fields for a way forward.

Contemporary fears of violence, of foreign dictators or local gunmen, are often inflated, misplaced and stoked up by powerful interest groups. Yet in rejecting the irrational moral panics which so often seem to pass as news these days, it is important that we do not fall back on nihilistic complacency or naïve civilisation. Chris Parton argues for a more nuanced, dialectic discussion of violence in the modern world.

Since the anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall last year there has been a renewed interest across Europe about the intellectual ferment of those years, with the publication of a host of previously untranslated writers. One such author is the Lithuanian Ricardas Gavelis. His Vilnius Poker, first published in 1989, was translated into English last year by Open Letter Books and shortlisted for the Three Percent Translation Prize. Rereading it, Chris Parton finds many lessons for today.