I resolved from the start of this commitment to sociological and autobiographical fragments not to include/expose my (nuclear) family to public gaze; and this was obviously right. So in recalling once more ‘moments’ from my past I am omitting many vital, intimate and permanent memories. It is often and appropriately said that as you get… Read More »
Data on the obscene concentration of wealth globally and within the UK continue to be published. Two new documents from the Equality Trust (3 December 2019) and the High Pay Centre (6 January 2020) have not received as much attention as they might – and should – have done. The Equality Trust’s ‘Billionaire Britain’ shows… Read More »
This an early and doubtless from a sociological perspective seriously premature attempt to respond to the Conservative victory in the General Election of 12 December 2019. We have some basic data but as yet little by way of analysis. I am siting with my laptop so promptly precisely because I too held the common view… Read More »
On retiring, contentedly enough, in 2013, I began to think through my future in more detail. I’d never had any intention of stopping either lecturing or writing/publishing (though I didn’t for a moment presume a flow of invitations for the former or interest/acceptance in relation to the latter). The thing about retiring is that you… Read More »
It is always something of a challenge to try and capture the central ideas and contributions of social theorists in a short blog. This is especially the case with a thinker like Bruno Latour. I am indebted here to Steve Matthewman’s (see ref) summary account as much to my own reading and understanding, and he… Read More »
I retired on 1 October, 2013, a few days shy of 65, and a month short of being entered for the REF. Cunning eh? It brought to an end a solid baby-boomer career, one not without its tribulations, but tribulations carrying a lesser degree of threat than that faced by my successors. For Paul Higgs… Read More »
I have written a few blogs about the work of Erik Olin Wright, and here’s another, although this time it arises out of an earlier collection of essays of his entitled Understanding Class (published by Verso in 2015). I focus here on his distinctions between three different approaches to class within sociology: (1) class as… Read More »
I had two alternatives titles in mind for this short quasi-autobiographical blog. The first was ‘Prince Charles and I’, the second ‘Me and Prince Charles’. The first strikes as a little courtly – as in the Queen’s routine refrain, ‘My husband and I’ – but accords with a pattern of speech I was taught and… Read More »
It is commonly and correctly asserted that the British aristocracy had lost its political grip by the conclusion of the nineteenth century. The once all-powerful aristocrats had been well and truly displaced by fast-forward bourgeois entrepreneurs. But they did not just fade away. A report in the Metro (of all places), drawing on research by… Read More »
From the early 1970s until I retired in 2013 I lectured on ‘death and dying’ to medical students, initially at Charing Cross HMS, then the Middlesex HMS, and finally at UCL Medical School (strange that all but the last no longer exist, having been incorporated into, or swallowed whole by, Imperial College and UCL respectively).… Read More »