Colin Burrow

Shakespeare in the news. It’s always stuff that isn’t Shakespeare or stuff that Shakespeare isn’t, isn’t it? Shakespeare not by Shakespeare. What a bore. Shakespeare a Catholic. What a bore. Poems that Shakespeare didn’t write. Stylometric fingerprinting suggests to boffin and Dan Brown readers that a scholarly conspiracy has occluded The Truth, which is to be found by the chosen ones who can decipher the acrostics scribbled in the gents in the Middle Temple crypt. What a bore.

1. Concern has been expressed about the proposal to deploy research ‘impact’ as a criterion for allocating resources to UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) under the new Research Excellent Framework. A small group of disaffected scholars with limited understanding of knowledge-capital markets have claimed that ‘impact’ will be impossible to assess objectively and will disadvantage some disciplines and institutions. 2. We regard impact as a visionary concept, essential to fair and transparent funding-distribution within a modern HE environment, and would urge that it become the sole criterion for the Research Excellence Framework. 3. An interdisciplinary team here at the University of Southern Comforts has developed a modest proposal to develop an Impactometer™,

Deep in our collective memories are those 1970s album covers, you know the ones: a dwarf in one corner, a strong man in eyeshadow in another, and somewhere in the middle of it all, but still in the shadows and probably in a leotard, is the artist formerly known as Bob, George, or whoever it was. Their spirit lives on in Bob Dylan’s Christmas video. Bob, well he’s always been a cussed so-and-so, and part of the game of being Bob is to do whatever your fans really don’t want, and then watch them twisting themselves around so that they can still love you in spite of it all.