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R.I.P. Jason Arday (1985-2026)

Posted in Biographical, Education, Literature, R.I.P. with tags , , , , , , on August 16, 2026 by telescoper
Jason Arday, pictured in 2023

I read the terrible news about the death of Jason Arday on Friday evening. The first thing I want to do is express heartfelt condolences to his family – especially his wife and two children – and his friends and former colleagues and my hope that the media who hounded Prof. Arday to his death will at least give them some space to mourn his loss.

The word “tragedy” is often misused, applied to any event that is sad which this certainly is. The case of Jason Arday is a true tragedy in the sense arising from Greek drama: the central protagonists are always flawed characters who makes bad decisions, but are propelled relentlessly towards their fate by forces entirely beyond their control. Once the right-wing media lynch mob got hold of this story they were never going to back off. This is just some of the coverage from one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

Source: Bluesky

Yes, Arday did bad things, but the media attention was utterly disproportionate. Nobody could be expected to withstand such treatment. How did the people churning out these articles think this would end?

I find this whole saga bleaker than anything Sophocles wrote, because nobody comes out of it with any credit at all. Not Arday himself, nor Cambridge University, nor the press, nor Nathan Coffnas, the white supremacist blogger who brought everything out into the open. The latter may have exposed academic misconduct, but his motivation was rooted in his racist views and undoubtedly malicious.

Of course academic misconduct is wrong, but it does not warrant a death sentence. And where was the media furore when a (white) History professor at Cambridge, William O’Reilly, was found to have plagiarised his own students essays? Professor O’Reilly, incidentally, remains in post. That’s just one example. I’m sure there are dozens more that we know nothing about, because they couldn’t be used to further racist ends. If standards are not applied equally then they can be used to reinforce prejudice, as they have in this case. It’s called hypocrisy.

The usual Culture Warmongers are using this case to further their agenda against the principles of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which are supposed to be adopted in universities and other institutions. For myself, this tragedy demonstrates that EDI* principles are not satisfied by mere tokenism, a facile form of window-dressing that does nothing to change the culture within the organisation.

(*For any Americans reading this I use the UK/European EDI in preference to the DEI used in the States which reminds me too much of OPUS DEI.)

In a slightly different context, this is why I have become cynical about the “widening participation” efforts by many higher-education institutions to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds. These may succeed in bringing more such students into courses – and hence greater income to the university – but they are rarely backed up by the support needed to enable them to succeed. Many institutions do not even track the outcomes of these students, not because they can’t but because The Management doesn’t care: once they’re in through the door that’s “job done”.

I came from what some people would call a disadvantaged background, although I don’t think of it that way. That I have had a career in academia is a result of an enormous amount of luck, starting way back in primary school. I would dearly like to see a system in which luck wasn’t so important, but what is being done now is not the way to achieve that. If we’re going to do EDI – and we should – let’s do it properly.

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Learning is the thing for you.

Posted in Biographical, Literature with tags , , , , on August 8, 2026 by telescoper

I was tidying up today and came across my copy (right) of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. This comprises four novels and is a sort of re-telling of the Arthurian legends. I remember buying it when I was at school, at which time I was reading a lot of fantasy novels of the swords-and-sorcery type, but although it is a fantasy, this book was not at all what I anticipated. It’s very funny in places and also full of anachronisms. White uses the legend of King Arthur as a kind of metaphor or political allegory and his novels are only loosely based on the familar stories of Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. The first novel was first published as a standalone book in 1938…

Anyway, I kept this book intending to read it again but never got around to doing that. The edition I bought is in quite small type so I might find it a struggle now! I’ve kept it to one side, though, as I know a certain person whom I think will enjoy it and is young enough to still have good eyesight. I will give it to him when we next meet.

The other day somebody shared the following (wonderful) extract from the first novel, The Sword in the Stone, which is largely about the education of the young Arthur (known by his nickname “Wart”) by the wizard Merlyn. The quote remains extremely relevant today as an expression of the joy – which I wish more people shared – of learning for learning’s sake.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theo-criticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

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Girl, by Edna O’Brien

Posted in Literature with tags , , on August 6, 2026 by telescoper

Irish novelist Edna O’Brien passed away two years ago. When I read of her death I didn’t know anything about her writing except that her first novel, Country Girls, had been banned in Ireland. That made me decide to read some of her work. As it happens the first book by her that I came across was the last she wrote, in 2019, which I bought over a year ago and has been sitting on my coffee table ever since. I started reading it this evening and found it so compelling that I couldn’t put it down until I had finished it.

Girl is set in Nigeria and is told in the voice of Maryam, a young girl who is kidnapped, along with her schoolmates, by the jihadists of Boko Haram. Maryam and the other schoolgirls are subjected to appaling horror and degradation described in unflinching detail. Eventually Maryam is given as a prize to a Boko Haram soldier Mahmoud, and bears his baby (simply called Babby). Maryam escapes with Babby with another girl, and drifts into and out of danger. Upon eventually returning home she is punished by her family, but the book ends on an optimistic note as she finds sanctuary.

The story is grim but O’Brien clearly had a great gift for storytelling, with subtle shifts in style as Maryam’s mental state shifts between horror, to relief, to sad reminiscence of happier times. In her acknowledgements at the end, the author explains that Maryam’s tale is actually a synthesis of accounts of various ordeals experienced by real-life women, to whom she spoke to in two visits to Nigeria, where she also learned something of the linguistic mannerisms of Maryam’s people. It is quite an achievement for an Irish woman in her late eighties to find a convincing voice for a young Nigerian girl subjected to pains surely beyond imagination. I think it’s a brilliantly moving book.

Girl has been criticised for O’Brien’s appropriation of the voice of a different culture, which (it has been claimed) makes it feel like an artificial exercise. A book of this kind by a Nigerian author would no doubt be more “authentic” in many important respects, but what I took from it (apart from the beautiful prose) is the emotional authenticity of the emotional tone and her desire to celebrate the strength of the many women whose struggles come together in the story of Maryam. The violent oppression of women is widespread in this world, so Maryam is a universal figure – a survivor.

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There Will Come Soft Rains

Posted in Literature, Poetry with tags , , , on August 4, 2026 by telescoper

In 1950 Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called There Will Come Soft Rains. The story appears in a collection called The Martian Chronicles. The title comes from poem of the same title, written in 1918 as a response to the horrors of World War 1:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

The Ray Bradbury story is set in the (then) distant future and describes, in a typically eery and unsettling way, the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. One house, in Allendale Carlifornia, fully automated to provide for the comfort of its owners, carries on functioning after the owners are both vapourised by a nuclear blast. Beds continue to be made, meals prepared, floors cleaned, and dishes washed, by systems oblivious to the fact the owners are no more. The house recites to the ladyof the house one of her favoruite poems, There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale. Then a fire starts by accident and the house burns to the ground.

I was reminded today that the date of the story (in the original version) is August 4, 2026. I looked for my copy of The Martian Chronicles when I got home but couldn’t find it. Here, however, are the opening few paragraphs:

The full text of the story can be found here (among a number of other places). It’s out of copyright.

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The Fallen, by Louise Brangan

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , on July 31, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve just finished reading The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy of Shame by Louise Brangan, which I bought a couple of months ago. This tells the shocking story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, institutions run by a variety of religious orders designed to accommodate “fallen” women and girls. Also known as “Penitents”, the inmates of these institutions were a mixture of the poor and unwanted, orphans, disabled, those who had suffered familial abuse, and those who simply didn’t conform to Ireland’s self-image of a virtuous Roman Catholic state.

After Independence in 1922 these institutions, which had already been in existence for over a century, became a sort of dumping ground for inconvenient woman of all kinds. Once inside, the Penitents – most of whom hadn’t really done anything wrong – were stripped of what meagre possessions they had, had their hair shorn, their names were erased, and they were put to hard menial labour washing and drying clothes. They were fed and housed – after a fashion – but conditions were damp and unsanitary and they were forbidden to make friendships with their companions, or even talk to them. They were locked inside and forbidden to leave unless and until the nuns decided they could, which was often never. The Magdalene Laundries were prisons in which every inmate was serving an indefinite sentence of hard labour.

Not surprisingly, the result of this soul-destroying regime was that many of the Penitents became completely institutionalised, some living our their days in a man-made purgatory. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the last of these terrible places – which was on what is now Sean McDermott Street in North Dublin – didn’t close until 1996. This book was published to mark the 30th anniversary of this event.

The book is a scholarly work, woven around the oral testimonies of several women, measured in tone but with an unmistakeable undertone of righteous indignitation. It also sets the story of the Magdalene Laundries in the context of 20th Century Irish history, especially the rise of the Catholic theocracy under de Valera and it subsequent fall in the wake of major scandals, of which the Magdalene Laundries were one. As a relative newcomer to Ireland, I was unaware of the true nature of these places and found this book educational as well as deeply moving.

Some comments cut very much to the bone. Here is a paragraph concerning a woman known in the book as Carmel who had been taken to Sunday’s Well for reasons she was never told to find that many of the other women there were quite elderly and infirm:

Going to bed that first night, Carmel had thought that she had been sent to Sunday’s Well to care for the old women. Gradually, she had come to realise, like many others before her, that she had been sent to the Laundry not to look after these women but to become one of them.

Another passage that hit me hard was about the disinterment, in 1993, of 133 bodies from a mass grave when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell the land to a property developer. The graves of the women, who had died while incarcerated at a Magdalene Laundry, were unmarked; another 22 were found later. Shamefully, only 75 death certificates had ever been registered. It is against the law in Ireland to bury someone without registering their death so 80 crimes had been committed over the years. No action was ever taken.

In recent years there has been a redress scheme for the survivors of these institutions, but what financial compensation can possibly be adequate for a lifetime of penal servitude? The most important message of this book is that stories like this have to be told. Ireland must confront the dark side of its recent past. Silence can be the worst form of dishonesty.

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Jodrell Bank – Patric Dickinson

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on July 29, 2026 by telescoper 
Who were they, what lonely men
Imposed upon the fact of night
The fiction of constellations
And made commensurable
The distances between
Themselves their loves and their doubt
Of government and nations;
Who made the dark stable

When the light was not? Now
We receive the blind codes
Of spaces beyond the span
Of our myths, and a long dead star
May only echo how
There are no loves nor gods
Men can invent to explain
How lonely all men are.

This poem is from a collection called “The World I See”, by Patric Dickinson, which was published in 1960. The poem was inspired by a visit to Jodrell Bank observatory. I have posted it before, but it seems apt to post it again now.

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Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo

Posted in Literature with tags , on July 18, 2026 by telescoper

A couple of months ago I did a post about the Guardian’s list of what it deemed to be the 100 best novels of all time. One book on that list was Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. I’d never heard of it before, and was delighted to receive a gift of it (and relieved that it was an English translation from the original Spanish). I’ve just finished reading it.

The story, set in Mexico, begins with a character called Juan Preciado, who promises to his mother on her deathbed that he will travel to a place called Comala to find his father, whom he has never met before. The book begins with a conventional first-person narrative by Preciado about his journey, but soon dissolves when he reaches his destination into complex fragments told in different voices. Thereafter the tale resolves itself into a series of conversations and encounters, but the precise sequence of these is difficult to discern. For instance, about halfway through the book we discover that everything that has happened is actually a flashback to much earlier events. We never find out whether the events depicted are memories or hallucinations nor whether the characters are alive or dead. It’s as if Preciado has wandered into two parallel versions of Comala, one populated by the living and one by ghosts. The original narrator himself dies but then carries on the narration as a ghost.

This is a highly original and deeply mysterious novel. Very little in this book is what it seems at first reading. It’s only 123 pages long (in the Edition I have), but it took me quite a while for me to find a path through the labyrinth, and even then I found much of it unfathomable, but I think that is precisely what it is supposed to be.

P.S. The Edition I have has a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, who cites Rulfo as an inspiration. It’s been a long time since I read his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude but I remember it well enough to see the influence.

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The Book of Evidence, by John Banville

Posted in Literature with tags , , , , on July 12, 2026 by telescoper

The Book of Evidence, by Irish author John Banville, isn’t a new novel – it was published in 1989 – but it was recommended to me a couple of years ago by an Irish friend and was in my pile of books to read until I took it with me on a recent trip.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this book, but found it an intriguing and unsettling read. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, The Book of Evidence is the tale of a dark journey into the mind of a murderer.

The story revolves around Freddie Montgomery who is an educated man – a scientist – but an unsympathetic and unsavoury character. I’d say he is a borderline sociopath, actually. He is the (evidently unreliable) narrator of the story, which is essentially that he tries to steal a painting in order to sell it and settle a debt, but in the course of the attempted robbery he kills a young servant girl in a very brutal way. He is eventually arrested and tells his story on remand awaiting trial. The plot is apparently based on a true story.

This isn’t a whodunnit at all, as the killer tells us what he did. There is a puzzle, though, which is why he killed the girl. The reader never finds out, but that’s probably because Freddie Montgomery himself doesn’t know. In his account he looks back over his entire life, he comes across as an aimless drifter who seems confused by many of the things he has done. It’s only at the very end that he shows any remorse for the murder he committed. At least he realises that he can’t blame his actions on anyone but himself (although he would obviously like to).

We never find out what happens at his trial, as the account finished before it starts. So it’s not a courtroom drama.

In some ways this book echoes The Outsider by Albert Camus as well as Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The confessional nature of the account in this book is given authenticity by Banville by making the narration dense and loquacious, with frequent detours and peppered with long words. Montgomery seem to be trying to impress the reader with his erudition but he just comes across as a narcissist. The cumbersome prose style is essential for conveying Montgomery’s inner voice, but it doesn’t make for easy reading. It’s not supposed to. I was intrigued enough to want to read more by Banville, including a sequel to this novel, Ghosts.

P.S. For non-Irish readers it is perhaps worth spelling out that, in Irish criminal law, the “Book of Evidence” is a mandatory set of documents the prosecution must serve to the defence before a trial in a higher court. It’s a term one finds quite often in media reporting of court cases in Ireland.

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Invisible Rainbows, by Alfredo Carpineti

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Literature with tags , , , , on July 8, 2026 by telescoper

Today has been a very frustrating day from the point of view of travel – apparently it’s too hot for trains to function – but at least that gave me time to read the book Invisible Rainbows by Dr Alfredo Carpineti (left). This is an engaging and nicely written tour of what we know (and don’t know) about the Universe organized by wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, from radio through microwaves and infrared, to ultraviolet and X-rays to gamma rays. All the wavebands outside the range of human perception, in fact.

What makes this book different from others that have taken the same general approach is that he builds that fairly conventional narrative around conversations with LGBTQIA+ scientists to demonstrate how diverse perspectives have contributed to the advancement of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology.

There are even a couple of quotes from yours truly, but it’s not just for vanity’s sake that I’m very happy to see this book published. It’s very nicely written and offers a very new perspective on science as a human endeavour. This definitely the first astrophysics book I’ve seen with a dedication “For all the queer kids reaching for the stars”. I guess I was one of those once! The book is at times humorous, even cheeky, but always driven by a passion for astrophysics and the celebration of human diversity. I wish I had I time to read it before Pride Month, but I’m nevertheless very proud to have featured even in a tiny way in such a delightful book.

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Bloomsday 2026

Posted in Literature with tags , , , , on June 16, 2026 by telescoper

So it’s 16th June, a very special day in Ireland – especially Dublin – because 16th June 1904 is the date on which the story takes place of Ulysses by James Joyce. Bloomsday – named after the character Leopold Bloom – is an annual celebration not only of all things Joycean but also of Ireland’s wider cultural and literary heritage.

If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It’s a long read,  that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve read it three times now, once as a teenager, once in my thirties, and again a few years ago when I’d reached sixty. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of Ulysses. It’s like life: most of us never figure out what that’s all about, and it doesn’t really matter.

Joyce once said of Ulysses

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that! They’re still arguing, The text is a kind of cultural celebration: references to Greeky mythology jostle with popular songs, lists, parodies, question-and-answer sections, and records of the characters innermost thoughts. The book is full of allusions and part of the fun is trying to follow them up. And anyone who likes puns will have a field day!

Anyway, here’s an excerpt. It’s from near the start of Chapter 4, where we meet Mr Leopold Bloom for the first time and discover that he’s fond of cats. He is making breakfast for his wife Molly, who is still in bed. I don’t know if Joyce ever had a cat, but he obviously knew a lot about them!

–o–

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!

—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.

—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can’t mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

I’ll also mention that if you have about 30 hours to spare you can listen to all of a radio broadcast of Ulysses from 1982.

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