Richard Bowring

Adam Thirlwell, writing about Yoko Tawada’s novel Suggested in the Stars, remarks that Hiruko ‘seems to be an avatar of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu’ (LRB, 21 November). It helps to know that Hiruko (usually interpreted as ‘leech child’) is actually the first imperfect product of the union of the creation deities Izanagi and Izanami, seen as a horror and abandoned to the sea in...

Two phrases stand out in Marina Warner’s Diary: ‘These REF stars – they don’t earn their keep’ and ‘an ecstasy of obedience’. The first illustrates the terrible damage inflicted on academia by successive assessments run by a funding authority (HEFCE) that changes the rules as it pleases with no thought as to long-term goals. Five years ago it was all ‘research, research and don’t...

Buddhism and Shinto, Richard Lloyd Parry writes, ‘have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors’ (LRB, 6 February). The situation he describes will be familiar to anyone who has read Carmen Blacker’s The Catalpa Bow (1975), a world where the line between the living and the dead is gossamer thin and where the need to pacify spirits who have been denied...

I was forcibly reminded of Iain Pears’s warnings of the coalition’s attempt to ‘extinguish all meaningful independence in higher education’ when I recently learned how Cambridge University, my own institution, plans to maximise its returns in 2013 (Letters, 14 April). There are staff whose whole lives are now devoted to working the system and we are being forced to follow suit. There is, of...

Ross McKibbin rightly castigates Hefce for the absurdity of using ‘impact’ as a measure of research in the humanities (LRB, 25 February). It is right and proper that universities should be accountable for public funds, but the funding mechanism has for many years been exerting undue influence on the kind of research we do. It generates a form of self-censorship, whereby we aim for short-term benefit...