We don’t often think of Singapore as being stratigraphic. That is, layered with history. Different times, or horizons, or universes, worlds, regimes (not yet sure of the right word) butting up against each other. But walking here shows it very evidently the case. Photograph: Jack Greatrex, the Shell petrol station on Serangoon Road with the…

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…