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  • Visit to the Walker Art Gallery

    Teaching at Edge Hill gave me my first opportunity to take students on a field trip – we went to the Walker Art Gallery, where Elizabeth Newell, a blue badge guide from Liverpool Tour Guide Services, took us round several of the galleries.  Obviously, we concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth century galleries, because that’s…

  • Teaching at Edge Hill

    I’m pleased to say that since the beginning of the year, I’ve been covering the Dawn of Modernity course for the first year history students at Edge Hill University.  It’s been great fun so far, and I must send a big thank you to Nicky Tsougarakis and all the staff at Edge for making everything…

  • Teaching the Cold War

    The last session of teaching before Christmas on the Liverpool Hope Twentieth Century Europe course at Holy Cross College in Bury was on the Cold War.  It’s an interesting topic, and one of the primary sources set for the students to study is an extract from Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered on 5 March 1946…

  • Juggling the workload and watching the strike

    BBC News has just noticed that many people working in our universities are on precarious contracts at several universities, as well as doing other low paid work for which they are massively over-qualified.  Hardly a shocker for anyone working in the sector, but it’s presumably come to light because of the UCU strike, which has…

  • Recording ballads 3

    I’ve spent a lot of time since the beginning of the year recording ballads for this website, to accompany my new book.  This is the third in a short series of posts about what I’ve been up to. There are more than 30 musical examples in the book and my plan was to record all…