On 4th March 1675, King Charles II appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. He was commissioned to “the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places...
An unfair trope sometimes labelled to a History degree is that it only entails learning about the past. Those who believe this think that renders it worthless. However, such a view clearly ignores what a useful degree History can be. Studying the past doesn’t...
According to research published by National Numeracy, approximately 17 million workers in the UK only have numeracy skills of a primary school child. That’s a staggering figure, constituting over 50% of the UK’s 2017 working population. Numeracy is the skill of being...
Alice Oswald has been appointed the first female Oxford Professor of Poetry in the role’s 300 year history. She will succeed Simon Armitage – who has just been elected as the UK’s new Poet Laureate – from 1 October 2019, to become the 46th Professor of Poetry, as...
On 8th July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat overturned off the Italian coast. He’d been travelling home from visiting his friends, fellow Romantic poets, Lord Byron and James Leigh Hunt, to his home on the bay of Lerici in the north-west of the...
Studying Can be Stressful – But it Shouldn’t be. Exam season has passed now, which will be a relief to many students. Some will have found themselves in a particularly constant state of stress. It’s actually true that you can feel relatively calm, yet...
