From 2006 my office settled in Mortimer Market on the ‘other side’ of Tottenham Court Road. I was now closer to UCL in Gower Street in more than a geographical sense. As well as constantly retracing the long familiar route to Dillons/Waterstones I found I was making more extended use of UCL’s classrooms and facilities.… Read More »
I spent many hours walking into Soho, or more likely through it, even before settling into my various offices in Fitzrovia. While based in Charing Cross HMS on Fulham Palace Road from 1975-1978 I often ventured eastwards via Soho, usually with visiting the – then many – secondhand bookshops along Charing Cross Road foremost in… Read More »
From 1978 to 2006 I had my office(s) in Fitzrovia. Over that period I became familiar not only with its cafes, and those of Soho to its south, but with its bars. Initially I read and wrote in a few chosen haunts, for many years using biros and exercise books. When I was joined at… Read More »
Academic writing has undergone some profound changes since I first became an author at the start of the 1970s. Some of these, but not all, are of concern. If I was ever asked for advice from younger colleagues – and one surely always should wait to be asked – I would usually include the following:… Read More »
Occasionally you comes across a paragraph or two that afford an eloquent summary of an approach that you wish you had written yourself. I do so quite often when reading the work of Andrew Sayer. The paragraph I reproduce here comes from his The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.191-2), which is… Read More »
While reading Hemingway’s engaging memoir of life in Paris (A Moveable Feast) in the 1920s I came across a passage that struck a cord, though I hope I have more patience than Hemingway – he of the notoriously short fuse – had available to him. When he was writing in a Parisian café, deep in… Read More »
I have always had a quiet interest in what was once openly discussed and occasionally commended as ‘muckraking sociology’. This may not surprise those who have read my previous blogs. But I was recently reminded of the existence of a book called ‘Muckraking Sociology: Research as Social Criticism’, edited by Gary Marx and published in… Read More »
On 31 December 2019 I was apparently driving at 37 mph in a 30 mph area in Cambridge, or so a police camera claimed. I didn’t contest this when I received a communication from the police. Instead I paid the requisite fine of £100 by telephone within the prescribed timetable (actually on 27 February 2020).… Read More »
I used to say to my students ‘never underestimate the cynicism of governments, whetever their political complexion’. Ok, this was shorthand: I didn’t strictly mean ‘cynicism’. Now perhaps I can clarify what I meant, having just read John Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened. What is abundantly clear from Bolton’s careful and well written account of… Read More »
The temptation to dismiss people who act against their own interests as ‘stupid’ should be resisted. How often did we hear that working-class ‘northerners’ who voted Brexit, or for an Old Etonian charlatan as PM, were ‘beyond stupid’ and deserved their inevitable punishment? Of course there exists a long history of sociologists trying to explain… Read More »