I have a thing about double negatives. It always amuses and checks me when somebody says something like, “I didn’t say nothing.” “I never did nowt.” I know what they […]

Driving north (again) on New Year’s Eve, I was listening to a Radio 4 program called Irreplaceable, featuring five biologists light-heartedly pitching their case for a particular animal grouping in […]

No, not a lisp; just recognition that the season in which to be gulled by over-commerciality, and to gluttonise and over-indulge, is of an ancientness that makes its Christian appropriation […]

I learnt the other day of The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s release of Dignitas Personae, an updating of its Donum vitae ‘on respect for human life […]

Last evening’s University Challenge threw up a question, which I only half caught as I was in the kitchen preparing supper, and that I (consequently?) got wrong. Something like, Which […]

You probably won’t believe this, but if you did then that would be great, because then we’d never have to disagree, and I’d never have to behave as though I […]

Recently, a Ph.D. student sought my opinion on a confusing banding pattern he was repeatedly seeing on some post-immunoprecipitation gel blot. (That one sentence skips rapidly through what is a […]

It’s forty years (yesterday) since the release of ‘The White Album’, that cornucopia of songsmithery, which remains my favourite Beatles album. So, the fact that we count to base 10 […]