Chris Bunting

Chris Bunting, Times Education Supplement, Teacher magazine, March 2003

IT was the most disastrous translation mistake in history: a simple language error that may have helped kill 15 million people.

In the early winter of 1941, the US Government's small band of Japanese translators were working under huge pressure. Japan and America were not yet at war but Japan's attempts to carve out an empire in Asia and America's determination to stop her had left the two countries a misplaced word or two away from a terrible conflict.

As diplomats from both sides tried frantically to reach a peace agreement, translators in Washington were working day and night on America's hidden weapon in the negotiations: transcripts of the secret communications between the Japanese embassy in Washington and their bosses in Tokyo. These intercepted messages were, the Americans thought, a window on the inner secrets of the Japanese mind and were to play a tragic role in the cataclysmic events that followed.

The crunch came in November 1941 with a major peace initiative by the Japanese. The Tokyo government was offering to halt the war in China and, eventually, to withdraw its troops in return for an end to a US oil blockade which was bleeding Japan dry. In Tokyo, it was seen as the last chance for the leaders supporting peace. Hardline generals and admirals were arguing that the Americans were playing for time, waiting for a lack of oil to make Japan defenceless. If this peace proposal was rejected, they said, war would have to begin immediately.

A secret set of instructions sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador about how to handle the peace plan was picked up by American code-breakers and a translation of the instructions was on the desk of Secretary of State Cordell Hull days before the Japanese ambassador made his presentation.

The translation (see box below right) gave the impression the Japanese had given up on peace. The secret instructions to the ambassador seemed to confide that the peace proposal was really an "ultimatum", a diplomatic word meaning the final non-negotiable demands which come before a declaration of war. It told the ambassador to be vague, to be as indecisive as possible in the coming negotiations. It talked of Japanese and US relations having "reached the edge" where "no longer is procrastination possible".

Yet much of this was unrecognisable from the Japanese original. Where the translator talked of an "ultimatum", the original said, in the language of a negotiator, "these are virtually our final concessions". What the translator had taken as demands for deliberate vagueness and euphemism, were actually instructions to give "approximate goals" for withdrawing troops from China. The misunderstandings permeated the entire document. Far from giving the impression of a cynical attempt at trickery, the original actually read like a last desperate stab at peace.

Sadly, it was the translation that helped decide the course of history. By the time Hull had finished reading, he was convinced that the Japanese were playing games with him. The US delayed its response for a few crucial weeks and in Tokyo the hardliners won the day.

On December 7, Japanese bombers carried out a devastating raid on Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in the Pacific. (Ironically, another intercepted message indicating that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked was left untranslated until the day before the raid and then not sent to the US leaders because the chief translator thought there were errors in the translation.) There were many other forces pushing Japan and the US into war in 1941, but many believe a simple translation mistake helped destroy the last hopes for peace.

Translators and interpreters are supposed to be history's little people: men and women beavering away behind the scenes to make sure everything goes smoothly. The great Russian interpreter Igor Korchilov recalled how the Soviet media used to airbrush interpreters from official pictures. Once, a newspaper picture of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev showed him chatting unaided with a foreign guest (Brezhnev's foreign language was, in fact, limited to the German "Auf Wiedersehen", when saying hello and goodbye to all foreigners). To the Soviet leader's side, readers could clearly see an open notebook and a pencil suspended in mid air.

Translators have a saying: "a good translation is like the air: nobody notices it until it is polluted." Yet time and time again these "little people" have grabbed the limelight.

Sometimes, as in 1941, mistakes have put them centre stage. Korchilov told another story about a interpreter at an international conference who heard a Soviet delegate use the Russian saying "an elderberry grows in the kitchen garden and my uncle lives in Kiev". The saying means about the same as the English phrase "mixing apples and oranges" but the interpreter had never heard of it. With no time to think, he substituted it with Shakespeare's "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" and was congratulating himself on his quick wits when a red-faced delegate from Denmark stormed on to the conference floor, shouting about the Soviets' "unwarranted slur on Denmark" and saying his country was a "paragon compared to the inhuman, totalitarian system" in the Soviet Union.

A much more deadly mistake nearly killed hundreds of Afghans in the recent war in Afghanistan. Leaflets were dropped in an area marked for bombing which were supposed to read: "Stay in your houses or we will kill you." The translation actually said: "Stay in your houses and we will kill you." The error resulted in hundreds of Afghan refugees wandering a deadly battleground.

At other times the "mistakes" are not as accidental as they may seem. When the US Government released a video tape of Osama bin Laden talking about the September 11 terror attacks in December 2001, officials said they had made great efforts to provide an accurate translation. However, an independent translation later revealed a Saudi Arabian dissident heard questioning bin Laden saying he was smuggled into Afghanistan by a member of Saudi Arabia's religious police and claiming that many senior Saudi religious leaders supported the September 11 attack. This was not mentioned in the original translation and many believe that the omission was a deliberate effort to avoid embarrassing one of America's key allies.

But to see the translators' role in history merely as blunderers and manipulators is to miss nine-tenths of the story. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that translators have shaped the world we live in.

Western civilisation itself would be unrecognisable without their contribution. Works by great classical authors such as Aristotle and Plato reached us not through careful stewardship in European libraries - they were ransacked in the Dark Ages - but through a remarkable process of evacuation by translation into the libraries of the Arabic world.

In the 9th and 10th centuries, the rulers of the new Muslim empire wanted the philosophy and science of ancient Greece translated into Arabic and were prepared to pay vast sums to the translators who could do so. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the most famous of the celebrated Baghdad school of translators, was paid the weight of his translations in gold (he used the heaviest paper he could find). The books Hunayn and his colleagues translated waited two centuries before they were once more slipped into camels' saddlebags to begin the journey back to Europe.

Again, translators were the key. In the 12th century, the famous Toledo school of translators in Spain began reimporting the great classical authors, together with great Arabic thinkers like Averroes and Avicenna, into Latin and Spanish. It was as if a light had been switched on: Europe suddenly had to cope with the intricacies of algebra, Plato and Aristotle's thought and advanced medicine and science. It was called the "12th century renaissance" and it was to form the basis of western rationalism's rebirth in 14th-century Italy.

The other great pillar of western civilisation as it emerged from the Middle Ages was the Church. Early Christian thinking was partly based on a translation, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible and, by the 14th century, its official texts were translations from Greek into Latin. Perhaps because of this heritage, revolution, when it came to the Church, came in the form of translations.

It started with John Wycliffe in England. As part of a campaign for Church reforms he produced the first English Bible in 1382 which was soon banned by a Church that saw the independent translation for what it was: a threat to its centralised control of dogma.

In 1516 came a new Latin translation by the Dutch humanist Erasmus of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus called for a return to the original text of the Bible and within five years Martin Luther was working on a German translation of the Bible which was to change Christianity for ever. As Protestantism spread across Europe, so did new translations of the Bible which were vital to the emerging Churches' independence from Catholic dogma.

An Englishman living in Germany, William Tyndale translated some of the original Greek texts of the Bible into English after meeting Martin Luther in 1524 and was immediately met with calls for his death. All copies of his translations found in England by the Catholic authorities were burned and their readers persecuted. In 1536, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake but months after his death, he had his revenge on the Catholic church. Henry VIII, who had just broken with Rome, ordered Tyndale's translation to be placed in every church in his kingdom. Eighty per cent of the Church of England's authorised version of the Bible is still Tyndale's prose.

Just as a translator-inspired Renaissance and a translator-directed Reformation began to transform western civilisation, translators found a new opportunity to express their power. In 1492, Columbus discovered America and it was translators rather than soldiers who did the most to establish European domination of the continent. Supported by relatively few soldiers, the Spanish relied on diplomacy to divide and rule the powerful native empires they encountered and it was translators such as Dona Marina - a native slave and one of the most powerful women in Mexican history - who enabled them to do it. Marina, the translator for Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, is credited with persuading native rivals of the Aztec emperors to join the small Spanish army and with keeping the Aztec emperor Montezuma committed to peace long enough to allow Cortes to destroy him.

If superior military technology provided the iron fist of European imperial expansion, sophisticated diplomacy based on the work of interpreters and translators was its velvet glove. They were often complicit in tricking natives into giving up their independence. In New Zealand, for instance, it has been argued that the Maori version of an 1840 treaty, which the British claimed gave them sovereignty, actually only talked about the British having control of white people in the country.

Translators helped set up and run the political and legal institutions that consolidated imperial control and it was often translators who shaped the culture of the colonies. At the start of the 20th century, for instance, the Dutch, faced with growing nationalism among their subjects in Indonesia, responded not by banning nationalist publications but by issuing a flood of cheap Indonesian versions of European romantic novels. Not only were these books highly effective in depriving the nationalists of readers, their tales of heroic Europeans guiding child-like natives helped bolster the imperial regime.

Translators have not always been on the side of authority. In Fascist Italy, intellectuals expressed liberal ideas, which would have landed them in prison if they came from their own pens, by producing a flood of translations of US literature. In India, two of the most important nationalist leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, both chose to translate the sacred Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita during the struggle for independence from Britain. They saw this as vital to building a culture of resistance to colonial rule and their translations of the text reflected radically different ideas about that resistance. Tilak argued the Gita's tale of violent struggle was a call to militant nationalism. Gandhi said its violence was metaphorical and emphasised the non-violent nature of its struggle. Both traditions have powerfully influenced Hindu nationalism since Independence.

Perhaps the translators' power is perhaps best expressed in the old joke about a Mexican bandit and a US sheriff: the bandit held up a bank in Tucson but was captured by the sheriff after a long chase. The sheriff, who couldn't speak Spanish, asked his deputy to ask the bandit where he'd hidden the money. The Mexican said he had forgotten. The sheriff put a gun to the bandit's head and said to his bilingual deputy: "Tell him that if he doesn't tell us where the money is right now, I'll blow his brains out." On hearing the translation, the bandit broke down and said, in Spanish: "It is at the bottom of the tree below Sundance ridge." Impatient, the Sheriff cocked his gun and asked the deputy for the translation. The deputy replied: "He says you haven't got the guts to pull the trigger."

First text box included in the article:

The Japanese had written:

This is our proposal setting forth what are virtually our final concessions.

The American translation read:

This proposal is our revised ultimatum.

___________

The Japanese had written:

In case the United States inquires into the length of the necessary duration, reply is to be made to the effect that the approximate goal is 25 years.

The American translation read:

Should the American authorities question you in regard to the suitable period (for keeping Japanese troops in China), answer vaguely that such a period should encompass 25 years.

___________

The Japanese had written:

You are directed to abide at this moment by the abstract term "necessary duration" and to make efforts to impress the United States with the fact that the troops are not to be stationed either permanently or for any definite period in China.

The American translation read:

We have hitherto couched our answers in vague terms. I want you in as indecisive yet as pleasant language as possible to euphemise and try to impart to them to the effect that unlimited occupation (of China) does not mean perpetual occupation.

___________

The Japanese had written:

In view of the strong American opposition to the stationing for an indefinite period, it is proposed to dismiss her suspicion by defining the area and duration of the stationing...

The American translation read:

In view of the fact that the United States is so much opposed to our stationing soldiers in undefined area (of China) our purpose is to shift the regions of occupation and our officials, thus attempting to dispel their suspicions...

___________

The Japanese had written: Strenuous efforts are being made day and night to adjust Japanese American relations, which are on the verse of rupture.

The American translation read:

Well, the relations between Japan and the United States have reached the edge, and our people are losing confidence in the possibility of ever adjusting them.

Second text box included in the article

Elvis helped end cold war

Igor Korchilov was the chief English interpreter for the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the talks with America which ended the Cold War. He never studied English at school but when he was working as a DJ as a young man, somebody brought an Elvis Presley record to him. "The crowd went absolutely wild, writhing and wriggling," Korchilov, who was nearly fired for playing it, remembered, "I was so taken by this music that I wanted to find out what those rock lyrics were about and one day I decided to start learning English. On January 7, 1960, I sat down on the cot in my six-by-nine room, pulled up the wooden stool that served as my desk, opened a textbook and tried to read lesson one out loud." Thirty years later, he was helping to shape history.

Chris Bunting, Times Higher Education Supplement, June 2002

IT was the year of revolution in Europe. In 1848, France, Italy, the German states and most of central Europe were in tumult. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were just publishing their Communist Manifesto . Even in England, the tens of thousands of Chartists massing on London's Kennington Common in April were seen as a serious threat to the established order.

Meanwhile, 14 students at Cambridge University had more important matters on their minds. They assembled in the rooms of undergraduate N. C. Malden at Trinity College after early hall and set about writing the first unified code of football. After prolonged argument, and much to the dismay of Rugby School's representatives, a rule book was written that favoured dribbling with the ball using the feet.

The students had no reason to know what they had begun. Fifteen years later, the Football Association was founded in London and adopted a code similar to Cambridge's. Some 150 years later, football can probably claim to have become Britain's second most significant cultural export, behind the English language. The sport's most prestigious competition, the World Cup, is not only the largest sports event on the planet but also the largest cultural festival of any kind. As the kerfuffle started by Marx and Engels's little pamphlet recedes into history, football's world governing body Fifa estimates that more that a billion people will watch the World Cup this month. Yet only a few football fans will remember the game's upper-class English origins.

Eduardo Archetti, professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo, has studied the sport's role in Argentine society since a copy of the Football Association's rules were sent to the editor of an English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, in 1867.

"In the beginning, football was organised in Argentina by Englishmen, the winning teams were English and many of our teams still bear English names. Until 1910, the national team consisted largely of players with British names from middle-class origins. But now no Argentine comes onto the field thinking he is playing an English sport. He is playing the Argentine game."

Argentine journalists spent the 1920s and 1930s expounding what Archetti describes as an "ideological construct of a national style of playing football". They stressed the inventiveness and spontaneity of their country's criollos (Argentines of European descent) and received support for their theories from the fact that Europe started importing rising numbers of Argentines to play on its major teams (Italy had four Argentines in its first World Cup-winning side in 1934). By 1928, the magazine El Grafico was calling for a monument to the imaginary "inventor of dribbling". It would show a barefoot boy from a slum "with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes... If this monument is raised one day, there will be many of us who will take off our hat to it, as we do in church."

More than 40 years later, Argentina's media discovered a 12-year-old, dirty-faced dribbling phenomenon called Diego Maradona in a Buenos Aires slum, and he quickly found an almost messiah-like place in the national identity. Archetti stresses that the game was a major force in creating that identity. The success of the country's players was used as a way of coming to terms with huge flows of immigrants from southern Europe at the start of the century and is still a major pillar of a criollo pride, accommodating the population's mixed heritage. "The English, with their concern with physical culture, exported this game to us, and we made our countries with it," Archetti says.

In Brazil, where legislators once considered replacing the symbol at the centre of their flag with a football, the game has played a similar role. When the influential sociologist Gilberto Freyre began an assault on racist nail-biting about the country's racially mixed population in the 1930s and started expounding a more inclusive, pro- mulatto view of the nation, he chose football as a vehicle for popularising his views.

"Our style of playing football contrasts with the Europeans' because of a combination of qualities of surprise, malice, astuteness and agility and, at the same time, brilliance and individual spontaneity. Our passes, our dummies, our flourishes with the ball, the touch of dance and subversiveness that marks the Brazilian style seem to show psychologists and sociologists the roguery and flamboyance of the mulatto that today is every true affirmation of what is Brazilian," Freyre wrote.

While South America's romance with football is well known, Grant Jarvie, professor of sports studies at the University of Stirling, points out that the game continues to be crucial in nation-building outside such heartlands. Palestine's short-lived campaign in the Asian Cup in 2000 was more than just a sporting endeavour, Jarvie says. "It was the first foray by intifada exiles into international sport. The team represented the coming together of a number of identities that constituted the Palestinian diaspora."

As the team's striker Ziad Kurd put it: "To me, football is politics. For sure, it means we're closer to having our own state. It is a way to say: 'Even if we're not better than you in politics, we're better in sports.'" Refugees from the Chinese occupation of Tibet and minorities such as the Saami people of Scandinavia have made impassioned calls for Fifa recognition of their teams as part of campaigns of national assertion. Four months ago in Afghanistan, despite widespread starvation, there was a huge demand to see a match against peacekeepers that was the country's first international sporting fixture for five years.

In England, football has played an important part in defining "Englishness" after devolution for Scotland and Wales. The St George's flag, once a symbol of racism for many, has become more widely accepted in the past decade and so closely associated with football that the Institute for Public Policy Research has proposed turning St George's Day into a celebration of "the good that football can put back into the world".

Jeremy MacClancy, professor of anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, even suggests that the emergence of football as a focus for English nationalism may have played a role in foiling the Blair government's plans to set up regional governments in England alongside devolution.

But football has also travelled far beyond the confines of national identities. When Senegal won the first game of this World Cup against their former colonial masters, France, their country's president praised their success in terms of defending the honour of Africa. The bleached-blond players of the Japanese football team are understood in their own country as playing not on behalf of traditional Japan but on behalf of a nonconformist, younger generation that refuses to be regimented. Japan's star player, Hidetoshi Nakata, lives outside the country after being hounded by the press for criticising the national anthem as uncool and boring.

Indeed, large numbers of today's football supporters spend much of their time subverting national identities. Fans of Glasgow Rangers display the St George's Cross and sing the English football anthem "Three Lions" during their confrontations with Celtic. Carlton Brick, who is completing a doctorate on the politics of football at the University of Surrey, points out that many Manchester United supporters have been increasingly defined as European and non-English. Their fan magazines publish cartoons caricaturing supporters of teams such as Chelsea as inarticulate, racist and rabidly pro-English. Similarly, supporters of the Turkish club Galatasaray boast their "European" identity with the chant: "Do you still play in your mother's league? We are European, we play in the European League."

Beyond the restrictions of local identity, FC Rosa in Brazil represents Rio de Janiero's gay community in one of the city's top leagues, playing dressed as women to chants from supporters of, "Hey, hey, hey - o mundo é gay ". Hard-core skinhead fans of Ajax football club in Amsterdam like to sing, "Jews! Jews! We are super Jews", tattoo themselves with the Star of David and wear the blue and white of Israel in preference to the club's official red and white colours. The vast majority are not Jewish. They display the affiliation because their city, Amsterdam, had one of the highest and most integrated Jewish populations in the world before the Nazi Holocaust.

For Archetti, it is football's chameleon-like ability to adopt the colour of its surroundings that is the reason for its huge success as a cultural export. Football is not, as the cliche has it, one language, but a thousand different languages and traditions.

Chris Bunting, Times Higher Education Supplement, November 2000

EVERY afternoon, Albie Sachs listened from solitary confinement in Wynberg, South Africa, to boys as young as eight being beaten by groups of laughing policemen.

The screaming was relentless and the beatings so hard that he saw splinters of cane littering the passageway when he was allowed out for exercise afterwards.

And yet he could make no complaint to the judicial authorities: the thrashings were being administered to the letter of the law, according to the sentences of magistrates.

That was about 40 years ago, near the beginning of a long fight against the apartheid regime.

Justice Albie Sachs, now a member of South Africa's constitutional court and one of the authors of the country's new constitution, carries with him an acute awareness that the rule of law can be an instrument of brutality as well as justice.

"I was detained without trial for 168 days, cut off from the world. It had been done in terms of a statute. I had no rights. I used to hear the juveniles being caned - that was also done in the name of the law and I felt a certain measure of rage against my own profession," he says.

Justice Sachs has seen more sides of the law than most supreme court judges. He worked as an advocate at the Cape Town Bar during the 1950s and 1960s. He was twice imprisoned by the South African security police because of his anti-apartheid connections and has written a moving account of the effects of solitary confinement in his book The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs.

Forced into exile, he worked as an academic lawyer, first at the University of Southampton and later as professor of law at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique.

Then, on April 7 1988, he became a victim of crime at its most cowardly when South African agents blew up his car in Maputo, Mozambique. He lost his right arm and the sight of one eye in the blast.

A man of quiet jokes and eloquent intelligence, he is now, at the age of 65, watching the legal theory he taught in exile and the ideas about justice he developed in half a century of fighting apartheid contribute to a constitution he proudly describes as "one of the best if not the most advanced in the world".

Visiting his old academic stomping ground at Southampton during a Constitutional Court recess in October, he talked about his fight to reconcile justice with the rule of law in his native South Africa and had a few provocative words to say about the British legal system's attempts to grapple with the same issues.

"As a young man at the Cape Town Bar, I used to love going down the corridors, over the mosaic floor in the Supreme Courts. I would go flying by in my robes and I would really feel somebody. I loved the cut and thrust of debate and argument. It was a very legally dense environment. It is no accident that two members of your House of Lords practised at the bar in Cape Town.

"But, at the same time, the courts were totally white-dominated. There were strong judges who made a stand, but the laws were used to force black people to carry passes, to evict them from their homes, to deny them the right to work without permission, to criminalise love between black and white. It was all done through the law.

"That is the dual nature, the Janus-like quality of the law. The problem is to distil and structure life experience as someone fighting for justice in a way that fits into the values of the law."

When Justice Sachs talks about life experience, he does not mean time served as an advocate or on the bench. He means the kind of experience he had when, as a law student at Cape Town University, he visited township study classes after lectures: "I would be sitting in a shanty lit by candle light. You could just see people's eyes and cheeks and they were so full of passion for justice. I began to feel the real law was in the hearts of the people."

This identification of justice with the thoughts of ordinary people has filled Justice Sachs's writings, legal as well as autobiographical, with simple language. Concepts such as honour, honesty, humanity and equality crop up repeatedly and one word, dignity, has become a central theme.

"That is the dominant word. The passion of the people in South Africa wasn't to be able to measure up to an idea. It was to be able to live with dignity and that means dignity for all. It is for the oppressed and for the former advantaged," he says.

Dignity does not just mean rights to free speech, a fair trial and the right not to be brought to the brink of physical collapse by torture, as Justice Sachs was by the apartheid police. It also, he says, implies fundamental economic and social rights: such as the right to a roof over one's head, to an environment that is not harmful to health and to an education. Such rights are laid out in many constitutions, but often merely as guides to government action. In South Africa, they are fundamental rights enforced by the courts.

Justice Sachs and other members of the South African Constitutional Court have elevated the idea of dignity to a judicial philosophy in their implementation of the new constitution. He calls it "dignitarianism": it rejects a narrowly individualist restriction on the state's right to act on behalf of hugely underprivileged sections of South African society, but at the same time recognises individual autonomy.

It is a charter for judicial involvement in everyday questions of political policy-making that would have a traditionalist British MP shaking in his boots.

The Constitutional Court recently ordered the government to change its massive low-cost house building programme after a group of 1,000 former residents of a squatter camp, forced out by terrible living conditions, brought a case claiming the immediate right to adequate housing.

The justices ordered that the long-term solution of building millions of houses would have to be accompanied, and perhaps delayed, by emergency provision for the poorest members of society.

"We have rather timidly, rather reluctantly, picked up the judicial pen and started writing. Once you start doing it, you start enjoying it," Justice Sachs says.

He acknowledges the differences between the role of the judiciary in South Africa, where a strong and broad bill of rights is seen as vital to reconciling majority rule with all sections of a badly divided society, and its place in societies with firmer democratic foundations.

"Our constitution plays a role that is far more significant than Britain's new Human Rights Act could be, and happily so, because Britain is a country where there is generally a culture of respect, where there are vigorous institutions with long traditions."

But he also points out that "far from the UK being so super abundant in respect of human rights that you can export human rights to other less-endowed countries, one finds that the UK has lost more cases at the European Court than any other country.

"Prisoners, in particular, have been very vulnerable in Britain. When I taught criminology at Southampton (in the 1970s), we went to visit a number of prisons. I was very disturbed by the atmosphere there and the feeling of lack of dignity and rights."

The implementation of immigration laws is also an area of concern. He remembers one of the most ardent arguments for fundamental rights he has ever heard came from someone working with the traveller community in Britain who felt the rights of marginalised groups were being ignored.

"At present, our court very rarely finds itself looking to the decisions of the British courts to help us, whereas we are constantly looking at decisions in, for instance, Germany or Canada."

But he is optimistic: "When the extraordinary legal aptitude in Britain is applied to rights concepts, not at the margins but in a more fundamental way, I think not only will British society benefit but the whole world. I look forward to reading the judgments of your courts."

Times Higher Education Supplement, November 2002

"Julie" doesn't look like a victim of ageism. She arrived at one of Britain's elite universities last year aged only 22, with a clutch of three A-level grade As.

"I thought age wouldn't be an issue. I thought nobody would think about that. But it was an issue," says the law student, who does not wish to be named. "They were all 18 or 19. Most hadn't even been on a gap year and the discussion was dominated by the outcome of A levels, getting drunk and getting laid. I felt the fact that I had had a gap at all marked me out from them."

Julie, who had arrived late at university because of a medical problem, found herself lying about her age. She started telling people she was 20 "just to narrow the divide". The relentless partying of her fellow first-years further alienated her from the group and, as the year wore on, endless talk about her coming "21st birthday" celebrations started to build up mental pressure that culminated in a nervous breakdown. Without any effective pastoral support from her university, she finished the year and started the new term this October unable to attend lectures. Her degree has become a correspondence course.

Irene Ison is 72. It was when her fellow students started calling her a "smelly old cow" and "the old bitch" that she realised she was in for a rough ride. That was when she was taking a City and Guilds course with a group of 16-year-olds at Tile Hill College in Coventry. Ison, who won the national adult learner's award in 1992, subsequently graduated to an MA course in photography at De Montfort University, where the discrimination was "more mature". For her entire second year, her fellow students refused to tell her where they held the fortnightly cooperative study groups that were integral to the course. She turned up to a Christmas party to find nobody there and a message to the venue saying the rest of the year group would arrive when she had gone.

Ison, who has now finished the MA, is looking for a PhD place to research creativity and eccentricity in old age. She turned up to one interview to be told that applicants for the cleaner's job should go down the corridor. "One academic asked me why he should give me a place if I was likely to die during the course," Ison says. "They don't want a daft old duck in their class. You are intruding on a kind of cult of youth."

Such tales of a youth-oriented monoculture in some British universities are common among mature students. They would be a sad but perhaps peripheral issue if there was not evidence that age discrimination in higher education extended far beyond the attitudes of a few ignorant teenagers.

Tom Schuller, professor of continuing education at Birkbeck College, London, believes that assumptions about the age of students are endemic among academics. "You will find many academics organising their seminars with no thought as to whether they can fit into mature students' lives. There is a focus on full-time not part-time students, which again has an age aspect."

A mature student attempting to continue his or her education beyond undergraduate level will quickly discover that it is common among academics to discriminate on age in a way that would be unacceptable in other walks of life. High-profile postgraduate grant schemes such as the Gates Cambridge scholarships and the Royal Society's Dorothy Hodgkin grants have removed age limitations in the past two years because of concerns about discrimination, but it is still common for postgraduate funding to be limited explicitly to students in their 20s or 30s.

Carolyn Carr, a chemist working in industry and a former Daphne Jackson fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, says: "The model is you come out of your degree straight to postgraduate work and on to your PhD. Any delay and you are going to find it very difficult to build an academic career.

"The logic for these age restrictions is they are getting new blood into their fields, but you might ask whether they are just perpetuating the old blood," she says. "What kind of people are you going to get? Not women who have been delayed because of having families, not people who have started late into the system because of their backgrounds. You are more likely to get middle-class men."

Joe Baden, manager of a project at Goldsmiths College, London, to recruit and retain non-traditional students in education, says that age discrimination can be a very good proxy for other less acceptable forms of discrimination such as class, race and gender discrimination. "I don't think that is the intention in most cases, but that is the effect that people have got to understand," he says.

Julie already has limited prospects. If she chooses postgraduate study after she graduates, the Evan Lewis-Thomas Law Studentships at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for instance, state that "preference will be given to candidates who will be under 26, though special circumstances (for instance military service) will be taken into account". Julie, who has not done military service, would be unlikely to be able to use a studentship to fund a PhD, although a shorter masters course taken immediately after her degree might be possible. Challenged about Julie's case, Mark Hemmings, senior tutor at Sidney Sussex, said: "The main thing is that we are looking for someone at the beginning of their career rather than any particular age."

Barry Farleigh, who handles mature-student issues for the National Union of Students, believes part of the reason for what he calls "the massive ignorance" about age issues in higher education is a lack of effective representation.

"Mature students see themselves as the forgotten students. Even in the NUS, there is very little focus on these kind of issues. Not so long ago, for instance, we negotiated a 30 per cent discount on London Transport for 18 to 24-year-olds. We just completely ignored the over-30s," Farleigh says.

A conference of mature student NUS members last year discussed a motion to make ageism a "liberation campaign", NUS-speak for a top-priority campaign aimed at combating discrimination. "I had to advise them that there would be too much opposition from within the leadership of the NUS. There are people in the other campaigns, such as the gay and lesbian campaign, the women and the black students, who would feel the inclusion of age would trivialise theirs. It is not seen as a serious issue," Farleigh says.

Because large parts of the student and academic population are apparently ignorant of ageism, many hope that a government loudly committed to "lifelong learning" will address what Schuller describes as education's "massive systemic bias in favour of youth". Schuller believes that the government has already done some practical work. Significantly increased funding for community and work-based learning has helped sustain vital re-entry points into education for adults, he says. Money has also been pumped into researching age-related issues in education.

Nevertheless, "the focus of policy in relation to post-compulsory education has undoubtedly narrowed" since Labour came to power, Schuller says. The government plans to introduce legislation on age discrimination in the workplace by 2006, but it has produced no similar plans for education. More immediately damaging has been a "crippling" preoccupation with a target of increasing the proportion of 18 to 30-year-olds to 50 per cent. This, Schuller believes, has led to a "front-loading" of universities with millions of "middle-class underachievers at the expense of other groups who may not be able to take up the opportunity straight after school".

The move towards funding higher education through loans, which are not available to over-55s and are often highly unattractive to adults who already have debts and extensive commitments, combined with the large expansion in the availability of education for school-leavers has meant that the sector has got younger, not older, in recent years. Between 1996 and 2001, the number of under 25-year-olds accepted by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service rose by 24 per cent, from 258,913 to 321,093. The number of students aged over 25 went up by 0.14 per cent.

Ison, who missed three years of her schooling in the war, left school aged 14 unable to read. She then raised three highly successful children as a single mother. "I did my O levels in my 40s, my A levels in my 50s, my BA in my 60s and my MA in my 70s. I'll keep knocking on the door for them to let me in," she says.

Chris Bunting, Times Higher Education Supplement, April 2001. Subsequently reproduced in "Big Questions in Science" (Jonathan Cape, Hardback, 2002)

A solitary "matador" and a half-crazed bull replayed their parts in an old, violent ritual in a sun soaked arena in southern Spain. It was the summer of 1964 but film of the incident is still shown in lecture halls today.

As the bull bore down on the unarmed man it was apparent that he was no matador. In fact, the man at the centre of the ring, the renowned scientist Dr Jose Delgado, had never faced a charging animal in his life.

But the horns never reached the doctor. Seconds before impact, Delgado flicked a switch on a small radio transmitter he was holding and the bull immediately braked to a halt. He pressed another button and it meekly turned to its right and trotted away.

Delgado was triumphant: after 15 years studying the workings of the brain he had proved in the most dramatic fashion that understanding and control of its mechanisms had reached a refinement that allowed an animal's aggression to be turned on and off by remote control. He explained he had been "playing" monkeys and cats "like little electronic toys" to fight, mate and go to sleep using the same technique of inserting probes in the brain and electrically stimulating relevant tissues.

"A turning point has been reached in the study of the mind," he announced. "I do believe that an understanding of the biological bases of social and antisocial behaviours and of mental activities, which for the first time in history can now be explored in a conscious brain, may be of decisive importance in the search for intelligent solutions to some of our present anxieties."

It was the hot, high summer of scientists' belief in their ability to not only to explain but to intervene in the workings of the brain ....

(Because this chapter is included in a book which is still in print and because all claims to copyright have been bought from me by the publishers, I have decided not to reproduce the main body of the text on the web. The full chapter is included in "Big Questions in Science", Jonathan Cape, Hardback, 2002.)

Chris Bunting. Times Higher Education Supplement, January 2003

Education secretary Charles Clarke has had many nicknames in his rumbustious political career - "Biggles" because of his boundless enthusiasm and "two pizzas" because of his boundless appetite, to name but two - but the shaken-looking civil servant knocking back shots at the bar had a new appellation for his boss: "the rhinoceros".

"Estelle Morris was all very nice and fluffy. She knew her education stuff incredibly well. But you get the feeling with this guy that when he starts charging nothing much is going to change his course," said the mandarin, fresh from a "moderately terrifying" Clarke briefing.

It is a description those in higher education would do well to note, because the bull rhinoceros's ears are pricked and he is peering in their direction. The issue is widening access to higher education.

Clarke told a meeting of headteachers in November that it was "absolutely ridiculous" that up to 80 per cent of middle-class children went to university while only 5 to 10 per cent of poor children did so. Few university leaders, he growled, were "committed to ensuring that people from all backgrounds have an equal crack at getting into university".

A month later, he confirmed his deadly seriousness about the issue in a hugely significant policy change indicating that the government's previous top-priority target of getting 50 per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds into university was less important to him than ensuring "a much better class basis" in the 43 per cent currently attending.

His determination is understandable in light of the appalling figures. A National Audit Office report at the start of last year showed that only one student in ten at elite universities such as Cambridge came from working-class families. Even at the least socially exclusive institutions, less than half the students came from such backgrounds.

Less than a quarter of students in the sciences, social studies, law, medicine, languages and the humanities had a skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled manual worker as a parent. The most socially diverse subject area, education, drew only one-third of its students from such families.

Overall, working-class families accounted for more than 40 per cent of the UK population but produced only 25 per cent of university entrants in 2000-01 and, according to the NAO report, the figure was not rising. For Clarke and his new Labour cronies, who have discarded Labour's traditional emphasis on income redistribution in favour of social reform based on ensuring "equality of opportunity", the unthinkable possibility is that widening participation in higher education may be benefiting dull middle-class children more than the underprivileged.

In a society in which the lack of an undergraduate degree means exclusion from most professional jobs, a university sector that is now equipping most middle-class youngsters with BAs and BScs but excluding most of their less privileged peers may be functioning as a brake on social mobility.

But is higher education entirely to blame? A large body of evidence attests to deep divides in educational attainment between youngsters from different social backgrounds long before they think of university.

In an article for a Department for Education and Skills magazine in November, David Miliband, the minister of state for school standards, admitted: "We continue to have one of the greatest class divides in education in the industrialised world, with a socioeconomic attainment gap evident in children as young as 22 months."

He said the class divide, once established, became wider and more rigid as children progressed through school. Research by Leon Feinstein, an economist at London's Institute of Education, showed that 22-month-old toddlers from middle-class families were significantly better at tests in putting on their shoes, noting different facial features, stacking bricks and drawing shapes than children from working-class families.

Children of parents with A levels scored 14 per cent higher in Feinstein's tests than those without. A difference in weekly family income of £100 correlated with a 3 per cent improvement in scores.

These differences are partly explained by variations in child-rearing between parents from different social backgrounds. A study by academics at the universities of Alaska and Kansas in the mid-1990s found that professional parents were much more talkative than working-class parents. Children of the talkative parents had correspondingly higher scores in simple intelligence tests at age three. Reading to children, which varies with class, strongly influences cognitive development.

But there are also systematic differences in access to childcare and education from a very early age. While the government has invested millions in expanding pre-school education, low-income families are still much less likely to access high-quality childcare than professional parents, according to the Daycare Trust. This is significant because good childcare significantly boosts later educational attainment. The DFES's Effective Provision of Pre-School Education Project study reports that children who enter childcare settings at an early age and attend regularly show higher cognitive attainments than those who do not, even when controlling for the influence of child, family and home environment.

Some progress has been made in reducing differences between social classes'

attainment at primary schools. Since Labour gained power in 1997, the gap between the scores of junior pupils in England's poorest ten wards and the national average has narrowed by one-third. But they still score an average of almost a grade a subject lower than their peers.

Not only does a child's family background have a powerful effect, the background of those they rub shoulders with at school also relates with their achievement. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment reported in 2000 that, across the 32 countries it studied, pupils with classmates from poor backgrounds did less well at school, even allowing for their own social disadvantages. Truancy, low self-esteem and mental illness are disproportionately high among underprivileged children.

At secondary level, the situation is worse. Achievement falls significantly among working-class pupils as they begin to adopt the adult expectations and norms of their social environment. Here, too, there has been some levelling-off in recent years. The number of pupils getting five or more GCSEs at grades A to C rose more than twice as quickly among children of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers than among children of professionals. But a huge gap remains - 69 per cent of pupils from professional families get five good GCSEs, compared with 61 per cent of the offspring of other non-manual workers, 45 per cent of skilled manual workers, 37 per cent of semi-skilled manual workers and 30 per cent of the unskilled. Pupils from an unclassified social grouping, including large numbers of children from families with no wage-earner, had just a 27 per cent chance of getting five good grades.

Higher education's social exclusiveness is therefore perhaps not as "absolutely ridiculous" as Clarke would have us believe. There is a philosophical question about the nature of education systems. Are they, as new Labour believes, a tool for social change? (As Peter Mandelson put it in a recent article, the education system is the key to "transforming life chances, giving young people in deprived areas the chance to escape the limits of their birth".) Or are they, as the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and others have argued, really about recording, justifying and reproducing existing class differences?

An interesting philosophical puzzle but perhaps it is best not to get too philosophical when a rhinoceros is charging your way.

Chris Bunting. Times Higher Education Supplement, August 2001

ANTHONY Forde looks like a curious hybrid of a police officer and an academic. On top, the buttoned-up blazer and tightly knotted tie wouldn't be out of place at a freemasons' lodge. Below, the jeans and deck shoes quietly hint at senior common room sociologist chic. It is an unusual combination, but, for some reason, it sits comfortably on the founder of Britain's first undergraduate degree in police and criminal investigation.

A collector of stereotypes would be disappointed in the University of Central Lancashire academic. A serving policeman until last year, he exudes the down-to-earth, professional affability of an experienced officer. Answers to questions are brief and to the point.

But Forde is no Policeman Plod, blundering around the halls of academe. No sooner are we in his office, than he is talking, with arms gesticulating, on the causes of death of Lindow Man, a bog body dating back to the 1st century AD and housed in the British Museum. Forde dives into a half-hour exposition on why archaeologists' conclusion that the man died in a ritualistic killing might be just poor detective work.

"The archaeologists, who seem to find ritual killings whenever they find bodies, will tell you that this man was brought out, knocked unconscious, fracturing his skull, had a ligature put round his neck and wound so tight that it fractured his two vertebrae and then had his throat cut to ensure the blood was coming out."

Forde believes they have staged evidence to fit their hypothesis. "I think the evidence points to a suicide. Lindow Man has also got a wound to the back of his head, a sheared tooth and a wound to his chest that they haven't accounted for," he explains.

According to his theory, the cut to Lindow Man's chest is neat and it looks like he might have been trying out what it felt like to cut himself before cutting his neck. He then cut his neck but didn't get all the way across (a characteristic of suicidal rather than homicidal neck slashes). The ligature failed too (Forde claims the narrow cord used was highly unlikely to have had enough force to break the man's vertebrae). Finally, an increasingly desperate Lindow Man smashed himself in the head with an unidentified object, causing a massive impact that whipped his head back, sheared his tooth, broke the bones in his neck and caused the damage to the back of his head when he hit the ground.

"Although I must stress that we shall never know exactly what happened to this man, I think an awful lot of rethinking has to be done. When I talked to one of the people involved in formulating the original theory, I asked him how he came to his conclusion. He said he just made it up: 'We decided it was going to be a sacrifice because there had been lots of others and we made it fit them.' I was absolutely gobsmacked but he was quite happy about it," Forde says.

His willingness to confront accepted thinking has got him into trouble more than once in his life. After leaving formal education at 18 to follow his brother into the police force, he served in the special constabulary before joining the Metropolitan Police in the early 1980s, aged 21.

He was out again after just over a year. "Let's say the Metropolitan police and I did not see eye to eye on the way that police work should be done," he says.

Though Forde is unwilling to talk specifically about the "gross unprofessionalism" he witnessed, he does speak in the abstract about police cultures in which "it becomes acceptable to give members of the public a slap or more than that, if necessary, as a way of getting what you want". Forde found himself bullied and ostracised by colleagues because he would not fit in with the culture.

"For years afterwards I wondered whether it was my fault in some way, whether there was something I could have done, but in the end I decided it was their problem and I had to leave. It gave me an insight into what the police force can be if things go wrong."

After working as a legal executive into his late 20s, Forde resumed his search for a career in criminal investigation. He began training in forensic anthropology, the science of recovering and identifying human remains, at Sheffield and Bradford universities and later studied under the "high priest" of the subject, Walter Birkby at the University of Arizona.

"I was getting experience working with one of the most respected men in the field, assisting him to identify bodies in cases that were sent to him from across the United States. We were using bone analysis techniques that would be a mystery to many conventional pathologists trained in the use of soft tissue rather than bones. He describes the work as "the intellectual challenge of solving the puzzles at the core of a case".

When Forde returned to the United Kingdom, he found the law enforcement authorities unable to accommodate his new skills. The police forensic science service said that what he did was too close to a pathologist's line of work. The pathologists, however, said he needed a medical training to work with them. The Derbyshire police, who did express an interest in his experience, ruled he had to enter the service as a police constable and serve two years' training on the streets before he could work in his specialism.

It was a "slightly disaffected" Forde who joined the University of Central Lancashire last year after serving his apprenticeship at Derbyshire and being refused permission to travel to Bosnia to identify human remains after the conflict there because it would get in the way of his normal police duties.

Forde insists that he admires the competence and commitment to duty of most of Britain's police service, but he says that some of his experiences of inflexibility and conservatism among its officers have helped inspire his desire to reform their professional training. "Historically, the police have recruited people without any qualifications. There is research evidence and a fundamental feeling that police officers have a bit of a narrow perspective on life. They usually go into the police at a young age and they see nothing but policing. They are usually conservative in their attitudes, have not had a broad education and do not have a broad depth of understanding of society. I felt that by bringing them to university we could broaden their understanding, expose them to a lot of different cultures and different people and hopefully turn out police officers who were very switched on and aware of wider issues in our society."

While police-related university courses are well established at institutions such as Portsmouth University and the Scarman Centre in Leicester, none attempts the comprehensive practical introduction to police work that Forde's undergraduate degree at Central Lancashire will deliver, preferring to concentrate on specialised academic subjects such as criminology or investigative psychology.

The Central Lancashire course, which will welcome its first handful of students this autumn, will not only offer courses in specialist subjects such as forensic science and multicultural policing, but train all its students in the everyday skills of work on the beat. First-year students will be asked to don riot gear and tackle a man trying to knock their heads off with a baseball bat, while a house has been bought where realistic crime scenes can be created. An outdoor area has even been set aside for simulating the recovery of human remains.

"I do feel it will be revolutionary in terms of police training because we are offering a real and fairly comprehensive undergraduate training route to the police and other criminal investigative agencies in the country. The route into the police at the moment is still to do basic training in uniform skills and basic law at the internal police training centres. Then recruits are put onto the street for another 18 months. Courses are few and far between and tend to be short, although some people study beyond that.

"We are able to train students for three years. If you imagine how much information we can equip them with before they get into operational policing, then you will have people with a much broader knowledge about the discipline of police investigation entering the service. Hopefully, with those kind of people entering at the bottom it will increase the competition for higher positions and raise the standards in the whole service."

This was an alarming prospect for one detective who chief inspector Forde recently met. "All he said was, 'Oh my God! I'm going to have 21-year-olds coming in knowing more about police investigation than I do'," Forde laughs. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

Times Higher Education Supplement, June 2001

YOU have to admire the man's spirit. In 1682, Bartholomew Sharpe had just cheated the hangman's noose. Aged 32, he had about 16 years of piracy behind him, but in the previous two years had got himself into some particularly hot water.

He and 330 buccaneers had done what generations of Englishmen had dreamed of doing. After hacking their way across the jungles of Panama, they had stolen a fleet of Spanish ships and embarked on an unprecedented orgy of looting and murder up and down Spain's "private lake" - the South Pacific.

Unknown to Sharpe, this was all going down very badly back in Blighty. A fickle Government had just signed a peace treaty with the Spanish and the mayhem he was wreaking in the Pacific, while positively encouraged when he had set sail, was now a major threat to the new policy.

An execution court was waiting for him when he returned to Plymouth and his fate looked even more gloomy when the Spanish ambassador was appointed as chief prosecutor. Luckily , however, Sharpe had managed to snatch a copy of the Spanish charts of the South Pacific during one bloody raid in the Pacific and this precious intelligence appears to have persuaded the crown to arrange his escape from the hangman. In an age when the death penalty was common for much lesser crimes, Sharpe was set free upon payment of eight shillings and four pence.

Indeed, the authorities offered him a chance to go straight with a commission to command the admiralty sloop Bonetta, while the newly formed Royal Society was eager to talk to him about his west-east rounding of Cape Horn on his way home from the South Pacific, the first time it had been done by an Englishman. His sighting of icebergs on the journey appeared to disprove the then popular theory that there was a large habitable land mass south of America. All in all, a respectable life seemed to beckon.

So, what did he do? He bought a leaky vessel in the Thames and used her to seize the first foreign ship he came across - a French vessel off the South Downs. He then set sail for the Caribbean and resumed his piracy. In 1686, he was again charged and again acquitted. He was retried and escaped once more. The last we hear of Sharpe, he is lame and being held in custody by a nervous Danish governor of the island of St Thomas.

The aisles are likely to be packed when James Kelly, of Worcester College, Oxford, tells the full story of Captain Sharpe's exploits at the 70th Anglo-American Conference of Historians on July 5. Indeed, it would be no surprise if there was a Hollywood scriptwriter or two in the audience. If the mythical figure of the pirate has become one of the most enduring icons of western culture, Sharpe's life appears to have everything we want from a member of that fraternity: daring, dastardly and, perhaps most importantly, a seemingly incorrigible ability to make a monkey out of authority.

Pirates are ambiguous icons. They have inspired generations of myth-makers - from Robert Louis Stevenson, through Errol Flynn's scriptwriters, to the cartoonists of Captain Pugwash - and yet their trade is in violence. Walking the gang plank was just the sanitised version. The French pirate Montbars Languedoc, for example, became famous for slitting the stomachs of his victims, nailing a coil of their guts to the mast and applying a burning log to their buttocks so the intestines would be danced out of the body for the enjoyment of his crew.

Hardly the stuff of bedtime stories but Philip de Souza, a lecturer at St Mary's College, Stawberry Hill, London, believes this reputation for extreme violence, far from being an impediment to pirates as popular heroes, offers a first clue to understanding their allure. "These are people who do not conform to the normal constraints of society. They are seen as having super appetites, they are sexually potent and they are extremely violent. Add to that the fact that they can roam the oceans and you have a type of rebel without even the geographical restrictions of land-based bandits. They allow us to imagine what we might do if we did not have to obey the rules. They represent freedom."

So far so good, says Marcus Rediker of Pittsburgh University, but such analysis of the symbolic potential of pirates and other bandits fails to acknowledge the place their actual behaviour has had in establishing them in our cultural imagination. "As it turns out, their actual motivations are almost as good as their romantic image," he says. "A pirate ship was a place of freedom."

Rediker is one of a growing band of historians who believe buccaneers of the golden age of Anglo-American piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries - the period that furnishes many of our modern ideas about the sea robber - practised a kind of brutal egalitarianism and proto-democracy that posed a serious political challenge to the authoritarian establishment of their time. Researcher Peter Linebaugh, has called pirate ships "17th-century Soviets on water".

Ballads and pamphlets describing exotic pirate utopias in which the common seaman was given a vote and a fair share of the booty abounded in the popular press during the period and there is evidence that there was reality behind these claims. Some say they helped inspire the American revolution.

Archaeologists researching the Whydah, a pirate ship found off the northeast coast of the United States, found jewellery had been cut apart, suggesting that there had been a genuine attempt to divide it equally. Contemporary records show that many crews elected and deposed their captains according to democratic votes. There was sometimes a type of occupational insurance in force, with crew members being paid compensation for injuries they suffered - the going rate for a lost leg was about Pounds 150.

Some researchers have claimed that pirates were also a model of sexual and racial tolerance, with homosexuality widespread and black people comprising a significant and influential part of many crews. There were black pirate quartermasters and captains and, although specifically banned by many ships' constitutions, some women were known to rise to the highest ranks.

Rediker compares this egalitarianism with the "quite horrific" inequality that was the reality on conventional merchant and naval ships. While a pirate captain is thought to have typically taken only one and a half times the bounty of a crew member, the pay ratios aboard a conventional ship were more likely to be 60:1. Discipline was vicious, hunger was the norm and to the men who suffered under this system, Rediker claims, piracy was a self-conscious act of rebellion.

So, are pirates proto-socialist heroes or a bunch of violent criminals with the dubious glamour of a Ronnie Biggs or a Reggie Kray? The question is particularly apt as we teeter on the brink of another "golden age" of piracy.

According to Jayant Abhyankar of the International Maritime Bureau, the number of pirate attacks on shipping more than doubled last year to 469, four times the level ten years ago.

While some attacks are highly sophisticated operations coordinated by organised crime groups - Rediker likes to compare these with the state-sponsored privateers of the 17th century - the large majority are committed by desperately poor fishermen tempted by the riches being paraded in front of them on the world's shipping lanes. Abhyankar notes that, in some areas of modern Indonesia, the world's worst area for sea robberies, pirates are seen as "Robin Hood" figures, just like their 17th-century forebears.

He also points out that the number of killings of seamen by pirates rose from 3 in 1999 to 72 last year. One reported method of killing was particularly egalitarian: victims were tied up and the pirate crew each took turns smashing their heads in. Montbars Languedoc would be proud.

Chris Bunting, Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2003

A LITTLE knot of professors tumbles noisily from a freezing night into the lobby of the Adriatico Guesthouse in Trieste. Their evening has apparently been heavily lubricated with the delights of Italy's finest wines.

A cut-glass English accent peals across the ground floor. "Levin, I must say I thought your paper today was absolute rubbish," says Sir Partha Dasgupta, professor of economics and fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. "Utter nonsense."

"Professor Dasgupta, I am surprised you should say that. You've been lifting my work for years," retorts Simon A. Levin, professor of biology at Princeton University.

"Now that is a joke!" interrupts Dasgupta, "I have taken some of your stuff and brought it up to the necessary standardI" Your correspondent, rushing to investigate, half expects to find the two academics rolling up their sleeves for fisticuffs in the entrance to the Adriatico. It is a bit of a disappointment, then, to find them smiling from ear to ear and engaging in a bout of Chianti-inspired back-slapping.

"That is a joke!" Professor Dasgupta continues, launching into another stream of tongue-in-cheek invective against his colleague. This, it seems, is how two of the most respected figures in ecological and environmental economics prefer to express their admiration for each other: the more outrageous the slur, the more extravagant the implied compliment.

Realising that they have attracted attention, Levin turns, with a suddenly serious face, to his gathering audience. "Now I want you to understand we are not insulting each other because he is an economist and I am an ecologist. Very far from it," he says, suddenly breaking back into a grin, "It is a purely personal thing." They are soon back at it, hammer and tongs.

When dogs meet in the local park, they warily sniff each other's tails. When academic disciplines come together, the event can be similarly tense: as much about marking territory and establishing dominance as about exchanging ideas. So you would be forgiven for a certain amount of trepidation at the prospect of a month-long conference bringing together economics and ecology in the beautiful setting of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.

In fact, while the professors bonded in their own inimitable style, the dominant mood in Trieste at the opening of the conference on February 10 was excitement. Economics and ecology have been cosying up to each other for years now. Environmental economics is an established subject in many western universities. But the conference at the Abdus Salam centre, set up in 1964 to help foster advanced scientific research in developing countries, was something new: dozens of economists and ecologists from the developing world participating in a programme that its organisers hope will revolutionise environmental economics and traditional development economics.

The problem, according to Dasgupta, one of the leaders of the effort, has been that old western-dominated approaches to environmental economics have treated the environment as a luxury: clean air and open spaces are valuable because they improve the quality of our lives. On the other hand, development economists working in the third world have often ignored environmental issues, perhaps because they are seen as rich people's luxuries. Dasgupta and others now champion a view that ecological resources are vital to the economies of third-world countries and that a detailed understanding of them is key to right-headed development.

In cooperation with the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics in Sweden, Dasgupta has been running a teaching and research programme for the young third-world ecologists and economists he sees as vital to researching ecological resources. A journal, Environment and Development Economics , publishes their work in a refereed journal alongside established western authors. The ecological and environmental economics programme at the Abdus Salam centre, bringing together academics from across the developing world in a three-year programme, represents the culmination of the effort and is likely to form the foundation for a permanent research institute on the shores of the Adriatic.

Vikram Dayal, a 34-year-old PhD student at the Delhi School of Economics, is thrilled by the attention given to young researchers by leading academic figures: "It is remarkable because they are actually spending weeks of their time totally with us. You get to talk at meal times, it gives you great confidence."

But Dayal's research at the Ranthambore National Park in Rajastan, India, demonstrates the hard-headed rationale behind the initiative. His work on the difficult relationship between humans and tigers in Ranthambore has led to a close study of a quick-growing mesquite bush. The bush, introduced into the local environment to provide cheap firewood, has spread virulently across the margins of the park. Its sharp needles make it unsuitable for grazing, forcing local farmers to take their livestock into the national park and into conflict with the wildlife.

"It is such a complicated picture - the economy is a part of the ecology and the ecology is part of the economy - that the research has to be done on the ground by local researchers. We have got to go back and convince people who make policies in our countries that they have to take account of the environment," Dayal says.

Eric Mungatana, a 33-year-old ecologist teaching at Moi University in Kenya, is in no doubt about the penalty if policy-makers do not listen:

"Poverty. When I was growing up, the economy in my village was based on fishing and growing rice, but 'development' in a part of Kenya hundreds of miles away, where they decided to build hydro-electric dams along the River Tana, has meant that the annual flooding of the river that people used to rely on has stopped. The people are a lot poorer and there are a lot of idle people because of this so-called development, but I am quite sure that the economic impact of drying out the river system was not properly understood when they took these decisions."

Mungatana studies the complex relationships surrounding the diminishing water quality of Lake Nukuru and the decline of a flamingo population on which its sizeable tourist industry is based. "One powerful relationship seems to be with the destruction of forest in an area called Menengai that seems to be affecting the flow of water into the lake. What you are seeing here is what you are seeing all over Africa: the unsustainable development of, in this case, forestry in one area will have totally unforeseen but potentially quite disastrous consequences for another part of the economy: the industry surrounding Lake Nukuru. The traditional economics has failed."

For the Nobel prizewinning economist Robert Solow, a keynote speaker on the first day of the programme and a self-admitted "old-fashioned" economist, the Trieste programme's effort to reach beyond the academic powerhouses of the West represents a tremendously exciting departure.

"We have to appreciate that this is not just about being fair to people but also about influencing what is happening on the ground: it is about building a network of people on the ground who are switched on to these ideas so that we can actually change things rather than just talk about it.

"The close working relationship between economists and ecologists also seems to be genuinely working here. In the past, I have observed conversations between economists and ecologists where it was clear that what was really going on was one-upmanship. Talking to the people here in Trieste, there seems to be a real focus on getting on with changing the way we see the world: getting the economists out of their counting rooms and getting the ecologists dealing with economic realities."

Chris Bunting, Times Higher Education Supplement, October 2002

When Nick Branch is on his favourite subject, you half expect him to throw up his arms and deliver, in his full-throated Welsh tenor voice, a rousing chorus of: "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud! There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow, And there let us wallow in glorious mud."

Branch has oodles of the stuff. Bags, buckets, tubes, trays, boxes and sacks of it fill his labs at Royal Holloway, University of London. He sieves it, sorts it, refrigerates it, waters it, dunks it in an array of chemicals, cuts it and, sometimes, just looks at it for hours in its original state. Sand is not really his thing, although he has been known to dabble. A bit boring, he says: not enough in it. Gravel can be a bit more promising. But mud sets his heart pumping. He is a mudlark of a very modern sort.

"It is surprising what you can get from a bit of mud," says the environmental archaeologist, proffering yet another bucket of the brown stuff. Branch will set up the country's first undergraduate degree in geography with environmental archaeology at Holloway next year, teaching students the techniques and methods of analysis through which mud and other apparently unpromising organic and inorganic materials can yield detailed information about geographic environments.

"I have just been working on a case this morning that has been brought to us by the police. Someone stowed away in a plane coming from an African country and died in the cargo hold," Branch explains. "The problem is that the plane stopped off in several different places and we don't know where he got on or where he comes from. But we have got mud from his shoes. We have gone and got samples from the airport grounds where the plane took off. If we can get a match we can start to trace him."

A less muddy but more complex investigation he is working on for the police involves algae, pollen and mineral remains. He is trying to find out about an African boy, whose dismembered body was found in the Thames last year, after what is suspected to have been a "muti" ritualistic killing.

"We can look at the algae that have been deposited in the body to say whether it was placed in the estuary, a predominantly marine environment, or much further up the river in a fresh water environment. What we have found suggests that he was placed in a tidal environment where you have both types mixing, somewhere near the sea but not beyond Teddington lock, where you might expect more of a marine signature," Branch says.

"We are also looking for geographical information about the boy's origin. He was a young black boy but was he from the Caribbean, Africa or the UK?

"Only the torso was found, so there is little evidence. The work that we have done looking at the pollen in the large intestine has shown that he was alive in the London area within 72-hours of when he died. The pollen has become incorporated in food material that has been ingested and we can identify its origin.

"But his DNA shows us quite conclusively that he is West African in origin. Looking at the chemical composition of his bones tells us, for instance, whether plants have been grown or animals are grazing in areas with a particular geology. Within the boy's intestinal contents, we have also found a mineral material that is quite specific to certain parts of Africa. We have narrowed it down to three countries and it looks more than likely that it is going to be Nigeria. What the police are doing now is going there and collecting samples from domesticated and wild animals and from soils."

This kind of detective work is also used in the more familiar context of archaeological digs, where pollen spores, algae, snail shells, insect remains, charcoals and seeds found in the mud surrounding a site can often tell as much about our ancestors' lives as can more glamorous artefacts.

A project near Woolwich in North London is looking at a Bronze-Age wooden trackway. "It is a beautiful construction, between 3,000 and 4,000 years old," Branch says. "Wood wattling has been built up and there are planks going across the top of it allowing people to cross an area of marshland from higher ground and, perhaps, giving them access to resources such as fish, birdlife and the river itself.

"Right next to it we have got a 5m 2 wooden platform, also beautifully constructed. We have no idea of its function. What we will be able to do now is take samples from peat that is contemporaneous with the trackway as well as above and below it. We will look at insect remains and, using maps we have of insect populations in various temperatures, say specifically what the climate was like during, before and after this time. We will use pollen and other remains to say what the vegetation was like in the area, not only what was growing on the wetland, such as alder trees, but also what was growing on the dry land - whether, for example, cereals were cultivated.

"We want to try to establish when these people occupied this area, how long they were there and why they abandoned it. What happened? Did the water suddenly rise, did the temperature change? You begin to build up quite a detailed picture of the world around this trackway, how people lived, what happened to them."

Branch, who took an archaeology degree and MSc at University College London before moving to Royal Holloway for a PhD in environmental history, is obviously besotted by the clods of earth archaeologists used to regard as nothing more than a barrier between them and their discoveries. He tours his labs, showing off an incredible variety of ways of finding the information hidden in the earth. One room looks like a garden centre: little pots of soil line the shelves, waiting to be injected with resins as hard as Araldyte to turn them into solid blocks. Next, you are in a machine room worthy of a shipyard, where black-oiled machines slowly grind down the soil blocks into 0.075mm thick, transparent cross sections. Then, on to a room that looks like a medical lab, all computers and microscopes and methodically filed slides. Across the way, you enter an altogether more watery environment, where the contents of the mud are sieved out with a gold prospector's care. Next door, the buzzing centrifuges and white coats are more reminiscent of the chemistry lab.

Branch's challenge is to convince an initial entry of five undergraduates to follow him into this arcane world next September. Their BSc will give them a grounding in other areas of physical geography, but they will spend much of their time in the later stages of their degree in Branch's labs. He hopes to get them working directly on projects in Britain, South America and across Europe that he has developed at Royal Holloway.

His department, like other geography departments across the country, has suffered from falling applications from schools in which the subject has become an increasingly marginal part of the curriculum. This course hopes to exploit the popularity of Time Team and other television archaeology projects to draw students into a deeper study of the subject.

"I realise that not everyone is going to end up spending their life doing this but it would be nice if I could inspire a few people to investigate what is in the ground and what insights, with proper techniques and analysis, you can get out of it," Branch says. "We need people with a genuine interest in history, but also a strong science background. Whether we will find them, I don't yet know."

Chris Bunting. Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2001

HUGH Brody has friends in communities across the high Arctic and the thousands of miles of forest that lie between the tundra of Canada's far north and the wide prairies of its cultivated south. Few have made as much of an impression on him as a Dunne-za Indian called Jimmy Field.

In his house in Highgate, Brody tells the story of a man who "was a kind of genius of that territory and way of life".

"He was one of the men at the Halfway River Reserve in northeast British Columbia, in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I lived with his family for about 18 months as part of a project mapping the land use of his community, the hunter-gathering Indians of that area.

"Even his peers in his community were in awe of his extraordinary ability as a hunter. His ability to read tracks and his knowledge of the whole territory was incredible."

On riding treks with Brody, Jimmy would read the land. "He would say: 'two moose are heading west... Oh, there is a lynx here.' You would go all over this immense territory and he would always know there was some trail up here or some way of getting down a hillside there. There was this immense amount of learning carried in his brain. Yet he was quiet and modest about it all, always fun to be with, always teasing."

That was more than 20 years ago. About two years ago, as Brody began preparing his latest book, The Other Side of Eden, he got a telephone call from a friend of Jimmy's family. Jimmy had disappeared.

Three weeks later, another call. "A young man had gone into the police station to say he couldn't live with his conscience. He and two others had beaten and killed Jimmy.

"You need to imagine what was going through these people's minds. Jimmy was standing on the roadside. They see a slim guy in tattered clothing. He always wore a denim jacket and a tattered cowboy hat. It was winter, so he was probably wearing gumboots. And he always wore cloth trousers, not jeans. He would have looked a bit tramp-like.

"They see this person who is inferior, stupid - just another Indian. They think of themselves as completely superior and completely informed and with all the rights, and they put him in the back of a pickup and they drive him around and around, trying to bounce him out of the truck. They stop the pickup and beat him to unconsciousness. Then they just dump him in the river. The body will never be found. It was swept away under the ice, out towards the Arctic Ocean.

"In one sense, it was arbitrary. But when you think about it, it seems to stand for so much more because of what these boys see when they see Jimmy - and what they don't see. I think of these boys, these redneck lads who had drunk too much, these frontier thugs who think they know it all but know nothing, and certainly don't know about this land they think is theirs by some colonial right. They destroy this man who is full of the reality of the place, a genius of this way of life, and think he is nothing.

"One way of life is attacking and aggressively thinking itself superior to another way of life." This last statement and the logical consequences of it seem to sum up much of the force behind Brody's work.

Brody, one of the most celebrated anthropologists of his generation, was the product of "a dual education" at Uppingham public school and the Hebrew study classes his immigrant family sent him to from early childhood. He left school for accountancy because he was told it was a good thing to do, but it was not for him.

After a few months, he got a place at Oxford University to read philosophy, politics and economics. It was not until a year of postgraduate study in Oxford that he "discovered fieldwork" and started to move into anthropology, first among peasant farmers in the west of Ireland and later on skid row in Edmonton, Canada. There, in the early 1970s, he accepted the offer of travel farther north and lived with the Inuit.

"After being there for about six months to a year, I began to see this division in the world between what I called somewhat jokingly 'HGs' and 'PGs' - hunter-gatherers and potato growers. The basic idea is that hunter-gathering and agriculture are completely different ways of living. One is not superior or any kind of progress from the other," he says.

The distinction was first used as a private joke to tease friends and family about their "HG tendencies" (such as their inability to keep to a schedule) or their "PG tendencies" (anal retentiveness). But in The Other Side of Eden, Brody deploys its logic to attack our fondly held preconceptions. Ideas of progress are violently shaken, and concepts of human nature are turned upside down.

Brody says humans did not start as hunter-gatherers and progress to farming. Analysis of the archaeological record and the fact that large parts of the world are dominated by a few relatively recently dispersed language groups suggests the extermination of old hunter-gatherer peoples by aggressive farming civilisations. Hunter-gatherers do not appear to have adopted farming, their societies seem to have been annihilated in a manner similar to the destruction of American Indian and other aboriginal societies.

Although we normally think of hunter-gatherers as nomadic, it is farmers who have engaged in a breakneck push across the globe, grabbing new land for the large populations their technology tends to encourage - and often producing militaristic states in the process. Hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, have tended not to stray from the territories that they know through their languages and traditions.

But farmers live a more comfortable life than hunter-gatherers, don't they? No, says Brody. Historically, farmers have raised large populations on rather limited sources of nutrition, maximised by agriculture's genius for clearing and intensively cultivating land. Brody talks of large groups of people working like ants in monotonous, often highly specialised work. Disease has thrived in agricultural societies' dense populations, which live close to tightly packed domestic animals. Disease has also cut swaths through relatively unresistant hunter-gatherer populations that come into contact with the host. Hunter-gatherer societies' relatively sparse populations, when not oppressed by farmers' insatiable demands for land, have tended to enjoy varied, high protein diets and much less specialised work.

Brody's work is full of such assaults on factual ignorance, but the heart of his argument goes much further. It insists on a deep appreciation of the hunter-gatherer mind as no less sophisticated or "modern" than our own. Brody acknowledges the genius of agriculture's demand for highly analytical minds, able to bring order to a chaotic world, capable of clearing land and cultivating with a few types of seed.

But he has spent much of his career - working as an academic anthropologist, documentary film-maker and researcher for hunter-gatherer societies in land-claim cases - confronting farming societies' almost universal denigration of hunter-gatherer ways.

Brody paints the hunter-gatherer mind as "humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition", able to accommodate the bewildering scale and uncertainty of nature; able to name the world in minute detail and yet live with its ambiguities and not reduce them to simplified categories.

This highly egalitarian mind exists in a society that dispenses with concepts of exclusive ownership of land and property but is also respectful of individual autonomy. Children and adults are typically valued for their ability to act as autonomous agents rather than their willingness to learn and abide by the strictures of farming societies.

"There is so much to learn from hunter-gatherer societies, and yet we are always trying to teach them how to become like us," Brody says. "If we could respect them more, we might be able to look into this mirror and understand more about what being human is. If only those boys had been able to see who Jimmy Field really was."

The Other Side of Eden is published by Faber and Faber, priced Pounds 20.00. Brody will discuss the urge to explore with novelist Beryl Bainbridge at London's Royal Festival Hall on February 19, 7.30pm.

Chris Bunting. Times Higher Education Supplement, December 2000

WHEN Jack Mapanje was arrested by the Malawian secret police, they asked him what crime he had committed. It was not a rhetorical question or an interrogators' ruse. They really wanted to know what he might have done wrong.

"There was a huge oval table. At the head of it was the inspector general of police and the rest of the table was filled with the chief commissioners of police from the whole country. I sat in the corner and the inspector general said: 'Dr Mapanje, His Excellency the Life President has directed me today to detain you. Because this is His Excellency's directive, I am afraid to tell you that we are not going to investigate your case because it would look like we were not trusting the higher authorities.

"'But, because we are not investigating, I brought these commissioners here to tell me what it is that you have done, to find out whether you are in our books. They all tell me that they don't know of you. So, we thought, before we take you to where His Excellency wants you to be, we should ask you: first of all, who you are, and, secondly, why do you think we should arrest you?'"

Mapanje, a man who alternates between seriousness and hilarity at high speed, breaks out with a huge belly laugh: "It was madness, more Kafka than you could ever think of. He was actually asking his prisoner why he should be detained. I didn't say anything, I couldn't say anything. The man was so embarrassed he didn't know what to do."

That bizarre, stilted episode on September 25 1987 was the turning point in Mapanje's life. On the orders of Dr Hastings Banda, the then dictator of Malawi, and without charge or trial, one of Africa's most exciting young poets and promising academics spent the next three years, seven months, 16 days and 12 hours under a brutal prison regime that he finds difficult to describe.

Now living in a small semi on the outskirts of York, he is writing an account of the time he spent in Mikuyu Maximum Detention Centre. "I need to get these memories out, because they are becoming a block to other writing. But it is not going to be a full-blown prison memoir. It is just going to pick out some of the events that may have affected our lives. I want to avoid inflicting too much pain on people and inflicting too much pain on myself," Mapanje says.

As an afterthought, he adds: "One of the things you notice when you read prison writing is that hardly anybody describes the life in prison. If you look very carefully, you might find one or two who do, but for many it is too horrifying." He pauses and says in a tone of academic interest: "Another thing you notice is many of them kill themselves."

In two books of poems published since his release in 1991, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison and Skipping without Ropes, Mapanje has given us some insight into the nature of his experience. The poetry is often charged with humour and positive testaments to humanity, but images of unexplained killings of inmates, of food riddled with maggots and cells infested with scorpions and "blood-bloated mosquitoes" confront the reader. Mapanje was suffering from fortnightly bouts of malaria (without proper medical attention) when he was finally released from his "stinking three and a half years" to find that his mother had died two months previously.

This kind of trauma is relatively easy for the outsider to visualise, if not to understand. But Mapanje describes his imprisonment as a turning point in his life in another sense. "This is the tragedy about my little life, if you like. They imprisoned me because I was too successful, too prominent. I eventually got out of prison because I had friends abroad and there had been a huge outcry at my detention. But, in a sense, the people who imprisoned me succeeded. They stopped my career in mid-track," he says.

Mapanje's rise had been meteoric. From a poor village in southern Malawi, his father left his family when he was still in the womb. His mother had to convert him from Anglicanism to Catholicism to get him into a school and brew millet beer to support him there. He turned out to be a star pupil. After studying at Malawi University and at London's Institute of Education, he published a collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, brimming with sardonic lyricism and barely disguised aggression against the stupidities of the Malawian regime. The book later won the Rotterdam International Poetry Award. The world started to take notice of Mapanje. While taking his PhD at University College London, he co-edited books on African contemporary poetry and African oral poetry and began to be broadcast on the BBC World Service as one of the judges of its poetry prize for Africa.

The Young Turk returned to Malawi University and became head of its linguistics department at the age of 39. He quickly started putting it on the map, helping to set up and becoming chairman of a linguistics association for sub-Saharan African universities shortly after taking up his post. He was made African chairman of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a steady flow of invitations to international conferences followed.

"It was all mapped out. I was an ambitious scholar, I was a bright young man from an English University. I was going to become a professor," Mapanje says before letting out one of his trademark belly laughs.

Now aged 55, Mapanje is struggling to get "snippets of jobs" in British academia. Having lost what should have been some of his most productive years in Mikuyu prison, he went into exile in England in 1991, and has spent the past decade on temporary contracts, doing a little academic teaching but a lot of creative and other writing classes. He is currently spending his time helping British students with basic essay technique as part of a temporary fellowship as an academic writer in residence with the Royal Literary Fund. ("Some of them don't even know what a paragraph is, my friend!") "It is extremely frustrating, but there is nothing I can do. I am really grateful to the Royal Literary Fund to have given me this work for two years now. But I would like to contribute more to education, I really want to, and I don't know how I can do it. I have applied left, right and centre."

While Mapanje stresses his gratitude for the international support he received while in prison, which he believes may have saved his life, he appears to have been shocked by the lack of sustained interest among British academics in the ideas he brought out of Malawi and his prison experience.

Shortly after he arrived in England in 1993, he began teaching part time at Leeds University and there, along with courses on African and Caribbean oral literature and creative writing, developed a highly successful course on "the literature of incarceration". In 1996, he was a casualty of government funding cuts and since then has been, in his words, "out in the cold". He has watched a surge of interest in prison writing in the United States and was recently approached by publishers Heinemann about a book on the subject, but the British academic establishment has generally maintained a stony face.

"I have been told that what I should have done was stay in England for one year and then go to America, if only because they are much more experimental in their education system than they are here," he says. "Some of the people who have refused me have been genuine, some have not wanted an African, some haven't wanted me because of my age, but others didn't want anybody who had lots of ideas that maybe didn't fit into their structures."

Mapanje's literature of incarceration course, which ran for only one year at Leeds, was massively oversubscribed. "The students loved it. I think the reason for that was this: for the majority of them, literature study on many courses becomes a matching game. They know their Foucault and they know their Bakhtin and they just apply it to the text, matching specific theoretical terms to specific incidents. As far as I am concerned, there is no thinking and there is hardly any real reading of the original text," he says.

"For the literature of incarceration, that doesn't work. There just isn't a body of theory and it isn't canonical, so they have to read texts - from Wilde to Primo Levi - that are insisting on what literature is about: restoring dignity to and recording the stories, not just of themselves, but of a wider community of people who can't tell their stories. It is not all feminism or post-colonialism (everything is post-colonial now). That kind of course is very challenging to some people."

And then, perhaps because he thinks he is becoming a little too challenging, Mapanje lets out another soaring laugh: "Sometimes I wonder whether this is what I am here for. Wherever I go, people are saying I am the rebel. I had someone ring me up last week to ask me to a human rights conference. He says: 'Can you come... we understand you are going to give us the radical view.' I thought: is this the role I always must play?"