Thomas Sutcliffe
Tom Sutcliffe: If it was a job interview in front of the nation, the vacancy's still open
"It will disappoint you and it will disappoint many people but we have come to the end of our debating time," said Alastair Stewart, wrapping up Britain's first television leader's debate.
Recently by Thomas Sutcliffe
Tom Sutcliffe: The life lesson all children need to learn
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
I momentarily turned into Norman Tebbit over the weekend – an unsettling experience which was vaguely reminiscent of that bit in The Fly when Jeff Goldblum suddenly starts buzzing uncontrollably. The catalyst in my case wasn't a careless test-run with a matter transmitter but overhearing a comment on the story that teachers were now finding themselves facing their own pupils on interview panels.
Tom Sutcliffe: This papal tone of petulance is shameful
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
The Pope's weekend address reveals that he still doesn't understand what went wrong
Tom Sutcliffe: We wrinklies really don't have it so bad
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
The lottery of birth date has given the current generation of over-50s unearned advantages
Tom Sutcliffe: Happiness – who needs it?
Friday, 19 March 2010
'There's a lot of grimness out there," said the TV producer Daisy Goodwin earlier this week, complaining about the literary miserablism she'd encountered as the chair of this year's Orange Prize for Fiction jury.
Victims should not be allowed to shape law
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Tom Sutcliffe: How does Denise Fergus's experience qualifiy her to talk about jurisprudence?
Tom Sutcliffe: The bitter ending
Friday, 12 March 2010
In what circumstances is it acceptable for a work of art to cheat us? Or, to put it another way, why is that we sometimes complain that a novel or a film has taken us for a ride ("colloq. to tease, to mislead deliberately, to hoax, to cheat") while at other times we celebrate the fact that we have been taken for a ride ("device on which one rides at an amusement park or fair"). I ask the question in the light of a localised cluster of twist endings – two of them in recently published novels and one at the conclusion of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. I might as well confess right away that I don't know what the twist is in the case of the Scorsese film, only that there is one and that it has provoked yelps of complaint from those who have seen the film. Comparisons have been drawn with The Sixth Sense – and they haven't always been flattering to Scorsese.
Tom Sutcliffe: No wonder our teenagers are so demanding
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
In a valedictory speech to the Association of School and College leaders, its general secretary, John Dunford, has suggested that a modern culture of "instant gratification" has made the job of teachers "immensely harder than it was even 10 years ago". Tutored by television talent contests and online gaming, today's students, he argued, have come to expect instant results and are easily frustrated by anything which doesn't deliver an immediate sense of progress. "To engage the impatient young people of Generation Y, something more is needed."
Columnist Comments
• John Rentoul: Clegg: A triumph of anti-politics
'Nice Nick' did well in the leaders' debate, but what counts most is the gap between the two biggest parties
• Editor-At-Large: Cameron insists we're all equal. The cheek of it!
I'm always up for a party – isn't that what we Brits are really good at?
• Rupert Cornwell: Nasa's voyage into the unknown
Obama's new announcement concedes the US can no longer afford a grandiose space programme
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