I have never much enjoyed writing conference speeches and making PowerPoints — which I am doing now, finalising them in a hotel in Takamatsu, Shikoku, Japan. For some academics, the joy in their work comes from a certain sense of solidity — knowing as much as can be known about a topic, and laying out…

There is a whole publishing sub-industry now of books for academics on how to write academic books. I’m using William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book (2013) for my own monograph, which I am revising ahead of a deadline of February 2026. These books turn the formidable task of writing a monograph into a neat sequence…

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929) has a superb phrase for a certain kind of joy: “the lamp in the spine.” This is in the context of eating: “One cannot think well,” Woolf writes, “love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light…