A refusal to visit a barber was a badge of defiance for Sixties youth, but Simon Goldhill, an academic with a beard, warns that in adult life anxieties over the boundary between public and pubic can be ticklish
Prog rock devotee Greg Walker takes an affectionate look at an intelligent and gloriously ambitious genre, and asks us to celebrate the era when rock's dinosaurs roamed the Earth
Contrary to expectations, it seems that we have succeeded in developing forms of society in which doing the hokey-cokey is what it's all about. Roy Harris pays tribute to an inspirational text
A fortnightly series in which academics step outside their area of expertise. Terence Kealey reveals how hypocrisy, violence and torture in the America of George Washington have helped create the US of George Bush
Gary Day chews over our fascination with foul-mouthed chefs and scary diet pedants and wonders if their ubiquitous TV presence is a symbol of social harmony or disharmony
In decades of linguinsania, Deirdre McCloskey has tried to learn a second language - everything from French, Greek and Latin to German, Scots Gaelic and Sanskrit - with no success. But she's still not resigned to monolingualism
Scientists in popular culture are inevitably mad, bad and dangerously keen on bubbling vials of ghastly liquids. Should this bother us? Yes, John Gilbey cackles fiendishly
The ban on performance-boosting substances in sport is a self-satisfied nonsense, argues historian Geoffrey Alderman in a fortnightly series allowing academics to step outside their area of expertise