Hannah Rose Woods

There’s something disconcerting about the conservative penchant for telling women they need to breed.

Many of Katharine Birbalsingh’s rules seem petty beyond belief – but she gets results. What does her approach tell us about our education culture war?

Our new reality seems a little too normal to be normal. Are we all giving a convincing performance of coping?

It is hard to explain what happens, psychologically, when you answer a question on the University Challenge set. Words are being said to you, very fast, and you have stopped experiencing them as linea

You’ve probably seen it by now. The drawing of the Queen, holding the hand of Paddington Bear as they walk away from us into the great beyond. A single corgi follows along, trailing bunting. Marmalade

Ferns spill over my bathroom counter; ivies and pothos trail from windowsills – it seems I have become a plant woman.

From GP appointments to trains, everything feels broken.

We’re all in agreement that everything in Britain is broken. The whole national health service is on the verge of collapse, from cancelled GP appointments to ambulances and A&E departments so over

It is 28 years since the Women’s Prize for Fiction was established, in protest at the under-representation of female authors in literary competitions. It was inspired, notoriously, by the 1991 Booker

We might be tempted to see prizes for women as less necessary with each passing year – but non-fiction is still seen as a male pursuit.

I am not sure I’ll ever get my head around the combinations of choice and circumstance that make us who we are.

You don’t need a degree in the humanities to recognise a faulty argument, but it does help if you want to make such an argument in a newspaper. “We should cheer decline of humanities degrees” ran a he

I’m very attached to my almanac. There is something inexplicably reassuring about its annual mish-mash of moon cycles and tide tables, folk festivals, wildlife facts, gardening tips and zodiac. I like

I don’t like change. When I think of University Challenge, my brain supplies images from the mid-2000s – the old dark blue and violet set; Jeremy Paxman with bouffant hair in his not-quite-silver

“There is no more miserable human being,” thought the philosopher William James, “than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.” The importance of a daily routine to free the mind for more interesting or productive matters was one of his favourite themes. Pity the person who lacked the autopilot of habits, “for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitio…

We are often told, in the midst of the culture wars, that to dwell on the less congenial aspects of the British empire is to judge the past by today’s standards. For those who argue that so-called wok

The countryside I often take myself to is strange in that it’s also a university. A mile or so out of town there is a little rural campus, an outpost of Nottingham Trent University for students in agr

It’s that time of year when what I think of as my “seasonal melancholy” is particularly acute. I cannot understand why we haven’t settled on a term for it. The air ache. That emotional tug we get when

How the bluestockings used wit and learning to subvert a deeply misogynist culture.

Higher education commentators have been warning for years of a looming crisis in university funding. Now, they are beginning to ask which institution will go bankrupt first. Few expect that the govern