While the key drivers of UK economic growth look on in bemusement, if not downright consternation, the UK government contorts this way and that over the means by which we might cut pensioners fuel allowance in order to afford more F-35 stealth jets. Meanwhile, a slowly growing concern relates to the brutal reality of how: […]

Last time out, this blog recorded the general consternation being felt not just in the USA, from where the story originated, but around the world generally and indeed everywhere where dedicated archivists and librarians pursue the careful work of recording the what, the how, and the where of how as a culture we make sense […]

Amidst the gales of rage and consternation being generated by the firehose of nonsense emanating from the new government in the USA, it is difficult to appreciate equally the implications of a New Order that places loyalty to an autocratic leader above considerations of experience, expertise, and integrity in determining who stays in their jobs. […]

An excellent “Long Read” by The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins reviews the many ways in which the British Museum has got itself into what she describes as an “omni-crisis” – beset by financial pressures, legacies of imperialism and, most recently, some internal skulduggery involving the spiriting of some 2,000 artefacts out of the putative safety of […]

A brace of articles in this past weekend’s Financial Times highlight in their different ways the challenges and opportunities involved in investing in cultural heritage. They make for a fascinating combination, potentially more interesting when taken together, but with a salutary warning if either – or both – are not addressed with focused will and […]

It seems that the tide is more clearly turning against Brexit. This is not just reflecting changing circumstances or opinions, but acknowledges two of life’s great distinctions that, at last, are impressing themselves on a wider British audience. First, simply wanting something doesn’t make it so and, second, grasping the nuances that evolve in the […]

Blogging colleague Brad Berens writes in his excellent Weekly Dispatch about the bastardising of the term “social media” by the growing tsunami of effectively anti-social media: doubly egregious as so much of it is not only negative and hurtful in effect but is actually designed to be anti-social. It hitches an ethical ride on the […]

This is not the first time we have blogged about Shakespeare’s First Folio and it won’t be the last. With the quatercentenary of the publication of this famous old book just months away (8 November) we are going to see more celebrations around the world of Shakespeare, most markedly in this week’s convention of the […]

By far the most compelling and visited component of the Cradle of English website, at least until we launched our Crane Court prototype immerzeo, was the home page map itself. The idea was simple enough, and still needs a lot of developing, but the history of the creative heartland of London could scarcely be told […]

Pulsing beneath the surface of our research into the life of William Shakespeare and the publication of his First Folio is the “authorship question”. This “question” is pulsing in the same way that people can still be found who, in the face of evidence and the keenest scholarly research persist in maintaining that the US […]