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/ 28 May 2008

Can we trust the experts?

When two car bombs were detonated within hours in August 1998 at the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, few people had heard of either Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. Nor was anyone that much better informed by 9/11. And that’s just the academics. Terrorism had never really featured as a separate discipline in US universities and even in Europe its popularity was in decline.

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/ 6 May 2008

A dose of empirical evidence

You can’t help seeing it as a kind of back-handed compliment. No sooner had his daughter announced that she intended to train to be a doctor than David Wootton decided to start work on <i>Bad Medicine</i>, a book that comes with the catchy subtitle <i>Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates</i>. Wootton smiles, unfazed by the association. "It’s true that my daughter’s career choice did spark my interest in the history of medicine," he says, "but the title is somewhat misleading.

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/ 17 July 2007

Chinese students favour UK

Imagine a chocolate-box Jane Austen theme-park Britain, where the poor are kept safely out of sight and the gentle-folk heave their bosoms with repressed emotion. That’s precisely the image that many Chinese students have of modern Britain, according to a new report carried out by Greg Philo, head of Glasgow University’s (Scotland) Media Group, for the British Council.