Portico 2014

THE MAGA ZINE OF UCL IS SUE 1. 2014/15

Market economy The Great Recession may be over, but what does the future hold?

Head in the clouds Why star-gazing may not be just pie in the sky R is for reading Professor John Mullan explores a life in books Back to the future When geeks rule, science fiction thrives On beauty The science of a very particular thrill

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PORTICO ISSUE 1. 2014/15

FE AT URE S 14 Market economy The Great Recession may be over, but

UP FRONT

02 Update 08 Extra Curricular 11 The Strong Room 12 Cloistered

challenges to traditional economic thinking continue

20 Head in the clouds The universe has inspired wonder in

mankind through the ages – but why?

26 R is for reading Professor John Mullan reflects on life lived

U C L+

41 42 45 46 48

Hello London!

South Junction University Matters Reading List London vs World

through, and in, books

32 Back to the future In the 21st century, geeks rule. No wonder,

then, that science fiction is thriving

36 On beauty The eye of the beholder is important, yes, but it’s not

the only factor. We explore the science

48

Front cover: A butcher pictured in front of his shop in Queen’s Market, a historic street market in the London borough of Newham

Editor: Mira Katbamna Commissioning Editor: Steve McGrath Art Director: Zoë Bather Project Director: Catherine Middleton Project Manager: Helen Bradley

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by YBM Ltd on behalf of UCL Development & Alumni Relations info@ybm.co.uk www.ybm.co.uk

UCL Development & Alumni Relations Office Gower Street London WC1E 6BT +44 (0)20 3108 3833 alumni@ucl.ac.uk www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni

Executive Director of Development and Alumni Relations: Lori Houlihan lori.houlihan@ucl.ac.uk

© UCL. The opinions herein are those of the authors or persons interviewed only and do not necessarily reflect the views of UCL or YBM Ltd. All content correct at the time of going to press.

DECONSTRUCTED

The new-look Bloomsbury Theatre The Bloomsbury goes all-inclusive.

No, not free drinks, but improved access and disabled provision throughout.

Getting down to (show)business. The basement now features an improved studio and performance area, a new performance space both for UCL and the wider world.

The show must go on… in style!

The inner foyer and theatre have been refurbished, creating plush surroundings for theatregoers.

Better connected.

A new layout means there are now better links between the Bloomsbury building and the new Wilkins Terrace, with access opened up from the north entrance and improved connections between Gordon Street and the terrace.

“Orders, orders.”

A brand new bar on the first floor means your chances of getting a drink have improved significantly (just don’t ignore the bell).

Hold on (actually there’s no need). The WC facilities have been improved throughout the building for your convenience.

STOP PRESS: NOBEL PRIZE FOR UCL NEUROSCIENTIST Ever wondered why some people seem to have a better sense of direction than others? It’s all down to their “inner GPS” system, and the scientists that made this discovery have been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – the most prestigious prize in science.

Professor John O’Keefe, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, first made the discovery of what constitutes a positioning system in the brain – nerve 2 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

cells that effectively form a map of the immediate surroundings – in 1971.

Subsequent work with Professors MayBritt Moser and Edvard Moser of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology identified further nerve cells that allow for precise positioning and pathfinding, making it possible for the brain to determine position. The award was presented to all three jointly.

According to the Nobel Assembly: “The discovery of the brain’s positioning

system has solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries – how does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?

“It has opened new avenues for understanding other cognitive processes, such as memory, thinking and planning.”

For more information, visit www.ucl.ac.uk/ news/news-articles/1014/061014-john-okeefe

UP FRONT

Love it? Hate it?

Email us at alumni@ucl.ac.uk or write to us at Portico Magazine, UCL Development & Alumni Relations Office, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Please mark your letters “for publication”.

Letters may be edited for length.

LETTERS

Illustration Hanna Melin

It was wonderful to read in the last issue about UCL’s Centre for Access to Justice (CAJ). With a whopping slash to the Legal Aid budget, what better weapon – and shield – could there be than a scheme whereby two worthy goals are served: one, to provide legal advice to those rendered vulnerable by the cuts, and two, to develop the practical skills of lawyers?

Professor Dame Hazel Genn is to be congratulated for this big idea, as are all those who execute it. Shiva Riahi, one of the pioneering eight law students to take the course, is absolutely right: law school must, of necessity, restrict most of its instruction to a sound knowledge of the laws and the ability to research and scrutinise their application.

The other half of the formula is wide exposure to the real people whose day-to-day predicaments are the stuff of the lawyer’s workload. The Dean of Laws makes the point that most of the legal problems that can blight people’s lives are the mundane and ordinary obstacles that affect children and adults, rather than the headline-grabbing causes célèbres.

Justin Fleming (UCL Laws 1991) The Centre for Access to Justice (CAJ) project described in Rick Pearson’s article in the last issue is highly valuable for society and of benefit to law school students as well.

For the law school students, I fully agree with Shiva Riahi that by involving law students in the real cases, they would then learn the practical techniques to solve complicated matters. As a current solicitor, I personally feel that there is a gap between the knowledge learnt at school and the proper use of the knowledge in giving practical advice to the client.

Skills for bridging such a gap are gained through practise and from the experienced senior solicitors. Thus, it is of pivotal importance for the CAJ project that a practising attorney is hired for supervising the work of the students.

Siqiong (Stella) Lu (UCL LLM 2011)

It was with great interest that I read “The Provost Departs” in the last issue and would like to add my sincere thanks to Professor Grant for all his efforts throughout a highly successful tenure.

In his interview, Professor Grant mentions that he is somewhat disappointed with the attention given to university league tables. Many of us sympathise with his stance – after all, any attempt to give an ordinal hierarchy to something subjective will undeniably face limitations.

It is a widely held view amongst the majority of alumni I speak to that, despite significant efforts across the board, UCL has not built a sufficiently strong brand to be insulated from the effect of university rankings. This lack of brand recognition, particularly outside the UK, makes rankings an easy point of reference for those unfamiliar with the College.

We are right to take pride in our joint fifth place in the recent QS rankings, however we would be wrong to ignore weaker results across the other league tables (both international and domestic).

Joey Tabarani (UCL Economics 2007)

Reading Malcolm Grant’s “Provost Departs” article in the last issue it was clear that UCL has had a deep effect on him. He clearly cared deeply for a university which he described as “firing on all cylinders”, something I couldn’t agree with more.

As an alumnus of UCL one is closely linked to the present reputation of the institution, and by having a capable leadership it can reflect positively on you.

Therefore it is important that alumni take an active role in UCL – by contacting your local alumni group or setting one up if there isn’t one, for example – and ensure that the reputation remains positive. Any platform for organisations and individuals to help fund UCL can only help maintain and improve its reputation.

Sheikh Asif Mahmood (UCL Bartlett 2006) UCL alumni rep in Qatar and the Middle East Congratulations on another informative and provocative edition of our alumni magazine: an excellent article covering both sides of the very difficult problem of press freedom, a farewell to an outstanding leader in Professor Grant and, in the final article, hope for those of us in our eighth decade.

However, what I was particularly pleased to see was the article on the Choshu Five, the Japanese noblemen who came to UCL in 1863 and went back to Japan to develop their economy. As a chemist, I was well aware of the story and of the role of Professor Williamson in championing their studies and eventual graduation. But who outside Chemistry knows anything about Professor Williamson?

I’m sure UCL has many more fabulous stories to tell. Could we ask for regular contributions from departments to provide an article for the magazine, perhaps on someone notable from their past, and which could then be made available via the UCL website and other outlets? Keep up the good work.

Jim Parkin (UCL Chemistry 1959, 1962.

UCL Staff 1965 – 2004) U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1 3

UP FRONT

THIS TERM

NEW CENTRE FOR BRAIN SCIENCE The Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre will support vital research into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

happiness

Thanks to UCL’s mathematical equation

ucl goes east

A new site at the Olympic Park

a nobel prize

Joint award for Professor John O’Keefe

new year resolutions

Starting or giving up, get planning now

sunbathing on the portico Time to wrap up

campus ice cream van Gone, but not forgotten

the ice bucket challenge All in a great cause, but enough!

revision notes Done for another year

LAST TERM

PHOTOGRAPHY SOCIETY

I

t weighs just three pounds, is the most complex part of the human body and, until recently, posed the most incomprehensible challenge to scientists trying to crack its code. But now the human brain is starting to divulge some of its secrets, and experts at a new unit at UCL hope the potential for more studies and trials will increase our knowledge further.

Consisting of in-patient rooms, a consulting room and a laboratory, the new Leonard Wolfson Experimental Neurology Centre (LWENC) has been established 4 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

with a £20m award from the Wolfson Foundation. The centre will support vital research into neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke and prion diseases.

According to Dr Vincenzo Libri, Head of the LWENC Clinical Facility: “Our mission is to provide world-class clinical and governance expertise and infrastructure to expedite translational research and the early evaluation of novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

We have exciting years ahead of us.”

Illustration John Martz

Huilian Qiu’s shot of the Musée D’Orsay in the former Orsay railway station, built for the World Fair of 1900 in Paris.

FREE RADICAL

Martin Zaltz Austwick, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Illustration Lucinda Rogers

F

rom a heady mix of interdisciplinary teaching and complexity theory, to the humble bicycle, this year has certainly been eventful. I came to the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) as a physicist, and this academic year I published my first paper as a “social physicist” – well, that’s what I call myself sometimes, although perhaps it implies that other physicists are anti-social, a bit unfairly.

The paper was on how people use bikeshare schemes in five different cities around the world. In London, of course, these are more often called “Boris Bikes”, and their movements are responsive to the ebbs and flows of the city – rush hour, tourist trips around the park, even tube strikes – and more often than not, the vagaries of weather.

The availability of more and more datasets like these creates an amazing challenge for people like me: how to use our knowledge to align these complex datasets with useful questions, ones that might tell us something meaningful about the world.

This could be what social media tells us about the cultural life of a city, what neuroscience tells us about how we navigate, or how to visualise and understand social networks. All of this could be important to cities in the future, and data, computation and mathematical methods help to pull these questions together on a fairly grand scale.

But I’m firmly in the camp that believes that the role of research staff at universities is not just about creating knowledge, but also sharing, translating and discussing it with all sorts of people. I think every researcher, PhD student and professor should do that in one way or another.

I was also delighted to be able to start a Public Engagement Fellowship this year with my inimitable colleague Dr Hannah Fry. Public engagement is where we take our research to people who aren’t academics, so we talk to previously underrepresented or underreached bits of

We are able to ask questions such as what social media tells us about the cultural life of a city or what neuroscience tells us about how we navigate the public by participating in various events, talks and workshops, and actually listen as well. I’ll be doing the crazy amount of public engagement I’ve always done (talks, podcasts, songs, videos, festivals…) but I’ll also be trying to help other people fit public engagement into their research lives.

So it may have been the Chinese Year of the Horse, but I’ll remember the recent academic terms as the “Year of Massive Amounts of Teaching”. It’s been my first full year as course director and, along with Master’s-level courses on programming and visualisation, I’ve started teaching on

the BASc, UCL’s undergraduate degree programme which combines arts, science and humanities.

This rich and terrifying mix appealed to my scattershot interests, and when I heard they were looking for second year option modules, I got a bit overexcited and volunteered to help write and teach on two separate modules, one on cities and one on data literacy.

While no course works perfectly first time, I’ve really enjoyed being able to try new teaching formats and create some really interdisciplinary modules – ones where students can’t stay in a particular box, but have to stretch themselves in areas where they may not be playing to their strengths.

I’m hoping these students get used to the enforced humility of constantly working across boundaries, and playing catch up with specialists in each field.

Life does get boring if you always know the answers. I imagine.

Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick is a lecturer in the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and Course Director of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation.

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UP FRONT

JEREMY BENTHAM SPEAKS:

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

W

hen I think about this quote from the social reformer Jeremy Bentham and conspiracies, I tend to think about the different ways people can avoid accountability. Both democratic and authoritarian governments do things to achieve this in different ways.

But the most insidious thing – and maybe this is what Bentham was thinking about – is that decision-makers act in strategic ways to make it more difficult for us to make them accountable for their behaviour.

One example that I’ve been pondering for a couple of years is how governments have responded to the strengthening of the international human rights system. As it has become more difficult for them to oppress their citizens, they have changed their violations to ones that are less easily linked back to them. So we find that governments are shifting from the use of extrajudicial killing, which is a public display of force as a means of control, to what we call forced disappearances: when they kill someone in secret and there’s no trace of them after the fact. This makes it 6 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

difficult for judges, lawyers or NGOs to prove responsibility.

There are more benign examples.

In a place such as the UK, where there is a highly democratic system, the government can try to avoid accountability in more subtle ways. For instance, they can put controversial changes through in holiday periods when people aren’t paying attention, make them very quickly so it’s impossible to scrutinise what’s going on, or use language that obfuscates their intentions.

The other thing that may happen is that you get a veneer of transparency and accountability. In the United States you have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, and something similar has been mooted here. That’s where the secret services have to go to request warrants to install wiretaps or conduct surveillance on individuals. But almost none of these requests have ever been turned down; the court acts more or less as a rubber stamp.

I don’t believe our governments are becoming more accountable. There may

be commissioners in charge of information freedom, but they appear conservative in what they think people should have access to. Are they really going to reduce secrecy, or just produce a legitimate cover for governments to continue behaving in their current way?

Challenging this is difficult if you’re outside government. You can trust whichever political party is out of power, but they often tend to change their behaviour as soon as they are elected.

Alternatively, you can go through the courts, which means you have to have access to a lot of resources. On average, people who have those means tend to be those who prefer the status quo. And modern technology has meant that Bentham’s fears have come true in ways he could never have envisaged – the suggestion that details of all our emails and telephone calls could be being secretly collated on a daily basis, for example, would blow his mind.

To find out more about Jeremy Bentham, visit www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who

Illustration Hanna Melin

Dr M. Rodwan Abouharb, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, argues that Bentham’s thoughts on secrecy are still relevant today.

454:

Donors who gave a total of £32,125 towards the work of the Centre for Access to Justice in 2013/14.

WHY ISN’T MY PROFESSOR BLACK?

Image produced by Stanton Williams as part of a visioning exercise in preparation for a Masterplan competition soon to be announced.

“Society has grown comfortable with black people in sport or music, [but] it has a problem with black people leading in public life and academia. This [idea] that black life is… anti-intellectual still echoes down the corridors of time.” These are the words of Dr William Ackah, Lecturer in Community and Voluntary Sector Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, speaking at an event hosted by UCL and chaired by President and Provost Michael Arthur in March 2014.

There are just 85 black professors out of 18,510 in the UK, and while the proportion

of black students has increased steadily each year and now stands at six per cent, the percentage of black professors shows a striking disparity, remaining at around 0.4% (according to the Equality Challenge Unit’s annual statistical report).

Shirley Anne Tate, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, said black academics were often excluded from academic networks crucial for advancement and struggled to find mentors, because black academics were

seen as outsiders. Meanwhile, Dr Lisa Amanda Palmer, a lecturer in working with children, young people and families at Newman University, Birmingham, claimed that university campuses were like the “colonies” of British imperial times, “where intellectual power and authority are [always] white”.

According to one blogger the event, “Why isn’t my professor black?”, which was attended by around 350 people, was “an insightful event that exposed racial issues in the academic system”.

UCL EAST

Olympic site proposal

P

lans for a new campus on the site of the 2012 London Olympics have been unveiled, part of the University’s vision for the future.

Based on the initial ideas, and if approved, some buildings at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park site could be finished as soon as 2018, with an academic presence of more than 3,000 students and 450 academic and non-academic staff by 2025.

According to Vice-Provost Professor Stephen Caddick: “Our new ‘open, connected campus’ – UCL East – will provide a unique environment for university researchers and educators to work side by side with researchers and innovators from other organisations, and with entrepreneurs. It is a striking example of our future vision being strongly influenced by the UCL 2034 strategy, focusing on the longer term and with a renewed commitment to working in partnership with, and for, London.

“There will also be a strong focus on attracting experts from across disciplines and sectors, and for the campus to attract and facilitate interactions between large international corporations, small businesses and universities. In short, a university campus fit for the 21st century.”

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EXTRA CURRICULAR

Bel Mooney (UCL English, 1969) remembers the 1968 Grosvenor Square demo.

Words Kate Hilpern Portrait Julian Anderson

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M

ore than 200 people were arrested and 86 were injured in Grosvenor Square the day that Bel Mooney was last here. “I was terrified,” admits the 68-year-old journalist, recalling the day of 17 March 1968 when the great anti-Vietnam war demo took place outside the Embassy of the United States.

Mooney, who was 21 and in her second year at UCL, had gone hand in hand with fellow student Jonathan Dimbleby, whom she’d married the month before, and she was well used to

attending protests. “But marching down from Trafalgar Square, I felt deafened by screaming chaos and aggressive chanting and was shocked by the level of hatred towards America, which I didn’t share, despite being against the war. My mouth was shut and so was Jonathan’s.”

Arriving at the square, things only got worse. “I saw a policeman being violent towards a student who’d stumbled over.

‘Hey, there’s no fucking need to be like that,’ I said. ‘You keep your mouth shut, young lady, or I’ll arrest you,’ he replied. Jonathan

UP FRONT

© Mirrorpix

HONORARY DEGREES

started being all protective of me, but then I lost his hand and we got separated.”

Next up, Mooney saw a policeman falling to the ground. “People moved in to kick him and so I jumped in with my hands up. ‘This is supposed to be about peace and love, not kicking a young policeman to the ground,’ I shouted. They did stop.”

Once reunited with Dimbleby, the couple became shocked by the distress of the police horses. “This one particular horse reared up in a panic, whereupon Jonathan, who’d been brought up with horses, did his horse whispering thing and the horse completely calmed down. I’ll never forget the policeman’s face, having expected the worst from us protestors,” smiles Mooney.

It left quite an impact, that day, she muses. “I think of it as a defining moment for me because the level of my distress left me feeling this wasn’t the way to do things, that it was so simplistic and ineffective. I felt it again in 1994 when I was famously involved in a road protest.

‘No more roads!’ came the shouts, and I just thought, ‘I can’t say that stupid stuff.

Life is more than slogans.”

Mooney had already come a long way from her first year at UCL by the day of the anti-Vietnam demo. “That first year hadn’t been good. I lived in three different bedsits in the first term alone. I felt terribly homesick and found London lonely and daunting. I just hung about in the Union

bar and slept with unsuitable people.

But then in my second year, I wrote an article on South Africa and the editor was Jonathan. It was big love immediately and we were married in February.”

Mooney loved feeling grown-up and settled in their rented flat in Fulham, where she recalls them spending their spare time talking politics and holding parties with cheap wine. “We thought we could change the world, in that idealistic way you do when you’re young, and that’s why we’d gone to the protest. I think we were seen as a power couple, which I suppose we did go on to be.”

Grosvenor Square could hardly look more different today, comments Mooney, taking in the calm and warmth of the sun.

“In many ways, I could hardly be more different either. I was so left-wing. Now, I vote Conservative and have a column in the Daily Mail,” she laughs. “But the essence of me is still the same. I still believe in individuals taking responsibility and looking after each other, not kicking policemen.”

Indeed, Mooney still gets a buzz out of seeing young students speaking out against the wrong in the world. “Having a social conscience and acting on it is so important when you’re young. It always will be.”

But on that particular rally of 1968, as she noticed all the daffodils squashed in the ground at the end of the day, Mooney remembers thinking, “I wish the daffodils were still standing and there had been no march.”

This year, UCL awarded honorary degrees to: broadcaster and author Mr Melvyn Bragg; Emeritus Professor of History Wendy Davies OBE; chief executive of EPSRC Professor David Delpy; physicist Professor Dame Athene Donald; computer scientist Professor Dame Wendy Hall; expert in linguistics Professor Geoffrey Leech; chairman and chief executive of Pentland Group, Mr Stephen Rubin OBE; philosopher Professor Michael Ruse; President of St John’s College Oxford, Professor Margaret Snowling; neuroscientist and President of Rockefeller University Professor Marc Tessier-Lavigne; and to linguist and former UCL Vice-Provost (International) Professor Michael Worton.

UCL awarded honorary fellowships to: founder and director of Kids Company, Ms Camila Batmanghelidjh; artist Professor Phyllida Barlow; comedian and author Mr Robin Ince; director of World Health Organisation Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health Division, Dr Elizabeth Mason; chairman of Montagu Private Equity LLP, Mr Chris Masterson; chairman of Better Capital, Mr John Moulton; managing director of Andrew W Y Ng & Co, Mr Andrew Wai-Yan Ng; and to chairman of the N Sethia Group Limited, Mr Nirmal Kumar Sethia.

IN NUMBERS Citrus Saturday*

150 32 3 31 375 1 kids involved

schools involved

tonnes of water

thousand citrus fruits

kg of sugar

tonne of ice

* a lemonade-stand initiative set up by ucl to show young people what it’s like being an entrepreneur U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1 9

UP FRONT

THE STRONG ROOM

Dr Gemma Angel (UCL History of Art 2013) chooses an object from the UCL Collections.

Interview Penelope Rance Photograph Alun Callender

These skins have fascinated me ever since I first laid eyes on them.

They have a certain power – on the one hand they are museum pieces, but on the other they are pieces of people. As a trained tattooist they obviously have a specific appeal to me, but they also have this power of subjectivity, traces that have incongruously outlived the people they belonged to.

And the butterflies are the most fascinating. We know they belonged to a professional Tattooed Man, who died aged 79, and the unknown pathologist or technician who preserved them has clearly taken aesthetic care with the display case and its contents. He or she noted that the lymph nodes were heavily pigmented, indicating that particles of ink are able to migrate through the lymphatic system.

But it is the tattoos that the pathologist has chosen to preserve, not the lymph glands. This suggests an interest that goes beyond the anatomical – the tattoos are a kind of curiosity. The way they have been presented is similar to the way that an entomologist might house a collection of lepidoptera.

The range of designs in the whole collection tells us something of the iconographic development of European tattooing as a folk art form. There is actually a very long tradition of European tattooing that goes back until at least the Middle Ages – tattooing was not, as many still believe, an entirely foreign practice imported from the South Seas. Christian pilgrims travelling from England to Jerusalem would often mark their journey with a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross – hence travel souvenir and religious tattooing have been a part of European tradition for a very long time.

We still see traces of this in the nineteenth century collections – tattoos of place names marking a journey, or the dagger-through-the-heart tattoo, which has gone through many stylistic changes but also has Christian roots. The evolution of the designs over time is fascinating, and collections such as these are invaluable in tracing the development and adaptations of a folk artform that has been – and continues to be – hugely misunderstood in European culture.”

The tattoos are part of the UCL Pathology Collections at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

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UP FRONT

CLOISTERED

Essi Viding & Eamon McCrory discuss antisocial behaviour, childhood adversity and the brain.

Words Kate Hilpern Photograph Alun Callender

W

hat makes some young people behave in an antisocial way?

Should we blame the parents?

The schools? What can studying the brain teach us?

Professor Essi Viding and Professor Eamon McCrory, co-directors of the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit, are attempting to answer some of those questions. They study young people who engage in antisocial behaviour, looking at how antisocial behaviour develops and how that may be connected to the neural consequences of maltreatment.

“Because maltreatment is one of the big risk factors for the development of antisocial behaviour, there is a natural overlap in the research themes,” explains Viding, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology. The ability to explore this old problem in new ways, including the use of brain imaging techniques, has inevitably led to some surprises.

Viding has a particular interest in how antisocial behaviour emerges. She says a key finding is that “antisocial behaviour in children who lack empathy appears to be strongly influenced by genetics – that is, they are genetically vulnerable (although not destined) to antisocial conduct – while children who are more reactive and have difficulties with emotional regulation appear to have more environmental origins to their behavioural problems.”

A recent experiment involved showing children emotional faces extremely fast while measuring brain activity via an MRI scan. “We found that the group lacking empathy did not have the typical reactivity in the emotional processing parts of the brain, whereas the group that had emotional regulation problems showed over-reactivity to the faces in the same brain areas.

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“Whilst for typical people the emotions grab the attention in the very earliest levels of processing, this showed that they don’t do so for the group that lacked empathy, and that they do so far too much for the other group. It’s fascinating to discover such differences among children who all display antisocial behaviour.”

As McCrory, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology, points out, this is particularly significant because clinical research demonstrates that the group who have so-called “high levels of callous

Children who lack empathy appear to be strongly influenced by genetics – they are genetically vulnerable to antisocial conduct and unemotional traits” represent a very high-risk group. “They are more likely to show more violent and more severe antisocial behaviour and persist in that behaviour over time.”

As a consultant clinical psychologist, McCrory has seen for himself that children who show callousness and severe patterns of antisocial behaviour can wreak real havoc on their peer groups, families and wider communities. “Yet what is very striking is that these children don’t seem to be receiving tailored packages of intervention that meet this

often quite unique profile that they tend to present with.”

McCrory has a particular interest in understanding the impact of maltreatment and early adversity. One of the most exciting areas of their work centres on challenging how the impact of maltreatment is understood. “Currently we know that children who experience abuse and neglect can have problems for which they don’t get intervention unless they present with something like anxiety of depression,” says McCrory. “In a new study, now underway, we are trying to identify early precursors

of long term vulnerability – something we are calling markers of latent vulnerability.”

Children don’t suddenly develop a mental health problem at 14, he explains.

“The early markers are there at eight, nine or 10. So with our longitudinal study, we are trying to systematically identify a range of possible neuro-cognitive markers that indicate a child is on a risk trajectory and that child is vulnerable. If we are able to identify those children at most risk earlier on then there is potential to intervene at an early stage and prevent mental health problems appearing in the first place.”

These children have already experienced more than anyone should in their lifetime, points out Viding. “It’s a terrible injustice to sit and wait around to see if they get a mental health problem if something could be done sooner.”

Among the notions that Viding and McCrory are particularly keen to challenge through their work is that children’s behaviours are all down to parents. “Nobody parents a blank slate.

The child brings something to the parenting equation and our research shows big cognitive differences among children

that will make some more challenging to parents than others.

“Our work is about exploring how these children see and understand the world and then how to help them in the world – something that has implications for parenting programmes too.”

“Ultimately, our research is only meaningful if it improves the lives of children,” says McCrory. “We need to demonstrate that research can make a difference, shape practice and inform health priorities in the way children’s services are organised and run.”

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MAR KET ECON OMY The Great Recession may be over, but what next? From market traders to rethinking what economic success looks like, PORTICO examines the ideas leading the charge.

Words Victoria James Photographs Marcus Ginns

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rash. Bust. Recession. Downturn. The vocabulary used around periods of economic uncertainty is suggestive of something broken, something that requires fixing.

But what if, instead of fixing our economy, we decided to rethink it, instead? What if we decided to transform our notion of what an effective economy looks like? Reconsidered what an economy can do? Re-evaluated the criteria for economic success?

“Challenges to the traditional way of thinking about and teaching Economics are being heard more now than at any time to date in my career,” says Professor Noreena Hertz of the Centre for the Study of DecisionMaking Uncertainty (CSDU). “For a long time, Economics went down a path that was all about models and mathematics. The human aspects, and the interaction of economics with politics and with history, were for a long time ignored.”

One indicator that ideas were shifting was the award, in 2002, of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences to research psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the first non-economist to receive the honour. Then

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The historic Queen’s Market in Newham, London (September 2014) – the archetypal street market.

in 2009, political economist Elinor Ostrom won, along with Oliver E. Williamson, for her work on economic governance and “the commons” – those global natural resources that are at the heart of any debate on sustainability, and underpin many of the new debates within the discipline.

In the light of a global economic crisis, with many real-world implications, perhaps this spotlight is not surprising. Professor David Tuckett, Director of the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty, believes economic models have historically been the product of ideology as much as empirical observation. But Tuckett has secured a $250,000 (£155,000) research grant from the Institute of New Economic Thinking to research a different kind of subjectivity at play in economics: emotions.

The dominant formal approach, he believes, by postulating omniscient agents, starts from the wrong place. “Many decision-making contexts we can observe involve uncertainty and conflicting interpretation of evidence. Economic decision-makers must interpret the world they live in. Together we have built an extraordinarily innovative economy based on vision, trial and

error. We believe that’s because humans can create pictures in their minds of the future and have feelings about what they envisage. They then build a narrative in which they have conviction and act to achieve it.

“One way all this can be tested is by the analysis of economic decision narratives. Because economic agents need to be convinced of the truth of their narratives, two emotion groups – excitement about gain and anxiety about loss – can be identified, and shifts in their relationship plotted through time.”

Though Tuckett cheerfully admits that this approach is still “very outside the mainstream of economics” – albeit it has caught the interest of those at the top of the Bank of England – it has proved remarkably accurate.

This has been demonstrated in retrospective analysis, notably in relation to an examination of the emotion groups surrounding the use of the term “liquidity” in the Reuters database from 1996 to 2010. Between 2002 and 2007, Tuckett found, anxiety expressed about the concept of liquidity markedly decreased, reflecting the cavalier attitude

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that culminated in the crash of August 2007, which manifested first as a crisis of liquidity.

But applying his technique to forecasting – that very human trait of looking into the future – Tuckett’s “emotional shift” analysis has proven able to predict the rate of GDP between one and two quarters ahead. As accurate GDP statistics are often not available for 12 months or more, this is much better, he says, than any current model.

The Mongolian example Interrogating the usefulness of economic models from a very different standpoint is Dr Rebecca Empson, Reader in Anthropology, who leads a five-year research project, funded by the Economic Research Council, titled Emerging Subjects of the New Economy: Tracing Economic Growth in Mongolia. She deals not in data-crunching and statistical analysis, but works on the ground with stakeholders in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

“As anthropologists we think we can come up with cultural explanations for different economic models, but even Western models differ wherever they work, within one country or country by country,” she explains.

Mongolia’s current growth is driven principally by discoveries of natural resources. Empson has studied the use of microfinance – the provision of modest loans to kickstart small businesses and diversify an economy that, like Mongolia’s, is too dependent on a single income source.

The modern microfinance model was pioneered in India and Bangladesh. But can its effectiveness in Mongolia be taken for granted?

Empson’s research shows not. “On the ground, variables may cause huge differences. Maybe people want to retain elements of non-monetary exchange. Or the people expected to start up businesses are actually nomadic. Simply applying the Indian model of microfinance, for example, might not generate the same outcome.”

Growth of new economics Once, academic enquiry might have been content to stop there, with the observation and analysis of cultural difference. But what distinguishes Empson’s work – and characterises this new form of economics – is a desire to question the performative nature of economic models.

“It’s important as anthropologists that we’re not parochial, that we don’t just stop at saying ‘it’s different here from there’,” she says. “We have to generate insights that will actually bring about change.” Her research findings are being placed in the public domain in Mongolia, so they can come to future solutions.

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are some very practical areas where economists are going now. These aren’t so much new areas of enquiry, they’re being occupied by new types of economists. They are tackling everything from how the government should word a tax form, to how to set up a job centre so people are more likely to secure work.”

This emphasis on practical application means that scholars are striving to transform not just economics, but economies, and the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), a flagship institute at The Bartlett that launched in October 2014, aims to do exactly that.

The Director of the IGP is Professor Henrietta L. Moore, whose past appointments – including Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, and Director of the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics – testify to her own cross-disciplinary expertise.

“We’re in a situation where people are evidently hoping that once the crisis and current climate of austerity is over we’ll return to the existing growth model – that it’s just a matter of balancing the books,” says Moore. “The only problem with this is

The most important question in economics today is not “what’s the model?” it’s “what’s the plan?”. You can’t jot it down on the back of an envelope

that growth can’t continue indefinitely – you can’t go on having a continuous growth model with an increasing population on a finite planet.”

For Moore, the most important question in economics today is not “what’s the model?” but “what is the plan?”. “What is the plan for a fully prosperous, sustainable economy? That’s not something you can jot on the back of an envelope,” she says.

But even the ambitious UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, possibly the most comprehensively cross-disciplinary approach yet undertaken to what was once simply a matter for economists, is only half of the work. The other half, Moore believes, will be getting people – policymakers, business and the public – to buy into an alternative plan.

“We are repeatedly told that if we don’t change both our behaviours and our ideas, we’ll be walking into an apocalypse,” she says. “But when you present people with apocalyptic scenarios, their response is often to go down the pub. It’s too much to process. So the message needs to change.

What consumers need is not apocalypticism, but aspiration – a new imagination for the future.”

Street markets are one of the most visible examples of an economy in action, and the historic, ethnically diverse Queen’s Market in east London is the archetypal street market.

But as Laura Vaughan, Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Space Syntax Laboratory, Bartlett School of Architecture, says: “Street markets are not only for buying and selling. Markets play a vital role in providing a social space, as an information resource, as an opportunity for work or as a site of social connections and interactions.”

In a chapter for a forthcoming book, London the Promised Land Revisited: The Changing Face of the London Migrant Landscape in the Early 21st Century, Vaughan quotes a description of Queen’s Market by Middlesex University’s Dr Nick Dines.

“The lines of stalls, aisles and series of openings set back from the busy pavements of the adjacent Green Street turned the market into a sort of surrogate town square that provided the setting for routine, unexpected and new encounters.”

Vaughan maintains that the smallscale economic exchange that takes place in street markets “is particularly important for contact between migrant and host culture, since while it requires acquaintance and trust it remains a rational transaction with little need for social contact”. In addition, she states, “the spatial integration of the market within the surrounding network of streets, such that it forms a continuity with the public space of the city, is another essential feature of its physical character.”

Vaughan adds that these characteristics are common to street markets in general, and says that where they continue to thrive, it is likely that they provide a vital resource for local and incoming populations alike. “Where immigrants have successfully settled in the past is where they have been able to live close to where the market – in its broadest sense – is active.”

So as Vaughan’s work on ethnic marketplaces suggests, it’s the confluence of economic, social and physical connections that creates the opportunities for a market to thrive, and which can serve to invigorate local communities.

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head in the clouds From man’s first squint at the Sun, humans have always wondered at how the universe works.

Words Peter Taylor-Whiffen

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© Paris Pierce / Alamy

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he Apollo 11 mission may have been one small step for man, but Neil Armstrong’s pilot, Michael Collins, had other things on his mind: the unprecedented, extraordinary view of the cosmos. “I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher,” he said later.

“We might get a much better idea of what we saw.”

That Collins was awed by his surroundings is beyond question. What is as notable, however, is that for all the astonishing technology, the mathematics, the physics, the hard science that helped him power the human race’s greatest achievement, his overriding emotion was one of simple wonder at the stars.

Left Jain cosmological map, Manusyaloka (‘map of the world of man’) made in Rajasthan in the 1890s. The central continent, Jambudvipa, the island of the rose apple tree, has rivers and six mighty mountains (rows with triangles), with Mount Meru at centre (yellow circle).

Above Ottoman map, Zubdat al-Tawarikh (‘The Fine Flower of Histories’) by historiographer Seyyid Loqman Ashuri, 1583, facsimile. The map shows the universe, the terrestrial globe, the seven stages of sky, the zodiacs and the position of the 28 days of the lunar month.

But then the cosmos, and our role within it, has captivated humans since we first walked the Earth. From man’s first squints at the Sun, through to the extraordinary pure science of today’s astrophysicists, we have always wondered at how the universe works. But why?

Much fascination has stemmed from various beliefs that the heavens determine our fates, from the Romans and the Greeks’ personalisation of the planets, through star-crossed astrologers, to Abrahamic religions placing their God in his heaven, looking down on humankind.

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view of the heavens only made us ask even more questions, says Dr Martin Holbraad, Reader in Social Anthropology. “The idea of infinity – a cosmos that cannot be fully or mostly known – fascinates us precisely for that reason,” he adds.

“This is almost certainly a modern idea stemming probably from Protestant refusals to imagine God as a human-like figure in the heavens. The Reformation took God out of the heavens, placed him everywhere, de-personalised him by transferring figural person onto his son, and made God essentially unknowable beyond that.”

Holbraad believes the idea of an unending universe stems from around the time of Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian friar, philosopher and mathematician whose radical – and accurate – heliocentric ideology, including the notion that the Sun was just another star, almost certainly didn’t help his cause when he was burned at the stake as a heretic. According to Holbraad: “Infinite cosmos from Bruno onwards seems to be a de-sacralised development of this idea of deity.”

But we don’t need to believe the universe is infinite to be awed by it, says Holbraad’s colleague Dr Allen Abramson. “Anthropology and comparative cosmology tells us that many cultures think of the cosmos as a finite, self-enclosed, often spherical entity that can be fully known,” he says.

“The idea that the wonder of cosmos stems from its gigantic unknowability will not be shared by peoples whose sense of wonder stems precisely from the ordered symmetry of the universe – for example, the pre-Socratic Greeks.”

The cosmos in literature Whether devoutly religious or fervently humanist, artists, writers and philosophers, too, have not been immune to that sense of awe.

Throughout history we have used our creative skills to try to capture and relate the scale of the cosmos. Take, for instance, William Shakespeare’s “majestical roof fretted with golden fire” (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2), or the philosopher Plato who wrote, more than 2,400 years ago, that “astronomy compels the soul to look upward”.

Geoffrey Chaucer was an outstanding mathematician who used his excellent knowledge of the planets to both educate and tease his readers, as Professor Richard North, a lecturer in the English Language and Literature department who teaches the cosmos in Chaucer’s poems, points out.

“In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer adds astronomical dates that are not in Boccaccio’s original text,” he says. “So we know, for example, that Criseyde first spotted Troilus on 2 April 1385, and that they spent their first night together on 9 June. Only a few other people would have understood those astronomical references.

Most understanding of cosmology is eccentric: restricted to boffins in the cloisters.

The really interesting thing now is that knowledge of cosmos is beginning to break out of these confines

Left Tibetan map of the world, following Buddhist cosmology, Tibet, late 18th or early 19th century. Mount Sumeru, axis of the Universe, is surrounded by the four continents and their islands in the Cosmic Ocean.

Vaishravana, Guardian of the North, sits on a white lion on Mount Sumeru.

I think Chaucer liked the craft of the astronomical detail, but he also maybe just liked showing off.”

But do we really need the imaginings of artists, or the ruminations of philosophers, to underline our wonder? Isn’t our understanding of how this all works a (dark) matter for space scientists? Surely astrophysicists, who deal in pure mathematics, must have little time for such fanciful ideas to pervade their work?

Not at all, says Professor Ofer Lahav, who holds the Perren Chair of Astronomy, and believes you can only truly begin to understand the cosmos by appreciating different past and present perspectives on it.

“It’s true that cosmology is a very solid discipline in physics,” he says. “But the cosmos doesn’t just offer quantifiable problems, it offers conceptual challenges. We have learned that the universe is not only expanding but is also accelerating. But what is causing that? Our study goes all the way back to Isaac Newton’s Principia and the laws of gravitation. Scientists observed a change in the movement of Uranus, for example, and by stepping back to look for an answer they discovered Neptune. We quite often don’t know the answers here and now, but we know people have been here before, and that’s very enriching.”

Cosmic collaboration Professor Lahav certainly sees a future of further cosmic collaboration between academic disciplines. “I’m fascinated by space, of course,” he says, “but I am fascinated by the pattern of its study, and others’ interpretations of what we see and discover.”

So can the pure physicists find common ground – or space, anyway – with academics who celebrate a more ethereal appreciation of the universe? Absolutely, says Dr Donnacha Kirk, Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy – because it has been ever thus.

“It was believed that understanding the heavens could give insight into God’s ordering of the world,” says Kirk. “Newton, for example, felt his study of gravitation was intimately connected to his study of theology and sacred history.”

But he says the artists’ and the scientists’ sense of awe won’t necessarily be for the same reasons.

“I certainly wonder at the cosmos,” he says. “But it’s not in the same terms as the writers or the painters.

My awe is for the science. I have this constant sense of wonder that the people on this small planet with our small brains could have figured out so much about the universe. The cosmos is an extraordinary thing, but my amazement is at what we as humans have achieved in understanding it.”

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Above Scenographia Systematis Mundani Ptolemaici showing the Ptolemaic system of the universe with the Earth at its centre. Originally published in 1660.

temporal location of being); namely a world presented to us as an array of so many multiple surfaces with hidden scales and depths that for a reason inscribed within this world compel us mysteriously to quest.”

But the urge to know the universe may actually not be functionally essential for humans, he adds. “Only cosmologists go in for fully situated ideas about who and where humans are in time and space; where a knowledge of cosmos has been linked to ritual design that is conceived to be essential for the renewal of the human realm itself, then humans are probably more disposed to know cosmos because they vitally ‘need’ it.

“But the wonderment of cosmos only really becomes a problem for ‘moderns’ precisely because they have arrogated divine powers to reproduce the human realm as science and technology, and

© British Library / Science Photo Library

Gusejnova, Honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Transnational History, believes it’s about a human desire to be in control of our surroundings.

“The space we want to control is proportionate to the space that we know,” she says, “so I would say the desire for knowledge expands with the desire for control. And this combination of control and knowledge is most visible in the space race.”

But why do we as humans have an innate sense of curiosity in the cosmos at all? Well, we don’t necessarily, says Abramson. “Dogmatists, or recipients of received wisdom, are not all that curious,” he says.

“Curiosity stems from a will to know what is knowable but hidden and compelling.

These conditions for the growth of knowledgeproducing curiosity imply a certain ontology (theory of being) and cosmology (spatio-

© British Library / Science Photo Library

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they only need cosmological understanding to the extent that it feeds into the construction and deployment of science, society and technology.

“In this human realm called society, consequently, most understanding of cosmology is or has been eccentric: more or less restricted to boffins in the cloisters – academia, labs and so on. But the really interesting thing now is that knowledge of cosmos is beginning to break out of these eccentric confines and cultural generalising.

How and why have become crucial matters for research in anthropology.”

Holbraad is equally convinced that multidisciplinary study is, well, written in the stars, and recently ran a series of seminars at UCL called Wonderments of Cosmos which brought together academics from a range of disciplines to talk about their view of the cosmos.

Above The Copernican System. Image taken from Atlas Coelestis. Harmonia Macrocosmica seu Atlas Universalis et novus totius universi creati Cosmographiam generalem et novam exhibens.

Originally published in Amstelodami : Apud J. Janssonium 1660.

“Scientific theories are by their nature more robust than, say, mythological stories or biblical interpretations of space,” he says. “But bringing disciplines together under one umbrella – and there’s no bigger umbrella than the cosmos – gives us a real appreciation not only of the science, but of who we are and where we came from in understanding it.”

Holbraad is in good company: Michael Collins was not the only man from that historic moon mission to realise appreciation of the cosmos goes beyond the science. Buzz Aldrin, who followed Armstrong onto the lunar surface on 21 July, 1969, struggled as much as Collins to articulate what he had seen. “We need more than just pilots and engineers,” he said when he returned to Earth. “We need to have people up there who can communicate what it feels like.”

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is for reading.

Professor John Mullan reflects on life lived through and in books.

Photographs Marcus Ginns

Alexander Hanrahan, English BA, Second year, at the Angel in Soho. “Reading is the ultimate form of exploration, of ideas, places and people you’ve never met or might not exist. It makes the world bigger.”

Despite the occasional complaints of my family, I don’t get rid of books that I have read.

They are my potted life history. My shelves are a record of where I have been. I have two such records. There is the one in my UCL office, where the books are all pretty much respectable and are divided up into subjects (Literature, History, Philosophy) and organised by period. Then there is the record at home, which includes all the PD James and Ruth Rendell whodunnits that I will never read again, but cannot consign to the Oxfam shop.

I well remember learning to read. I started primary school at five, entirely illiterate.

After a term spent getting measles, German measles and chicken pox, I became anxious that I was falling behind and made my mother borrow Janet and John books from the local library. I can see the purplish red of the library cover and hear myself reading “Spot can jump. See Spot jump”. I remember noticing (the sign of a budding pedant) how fastidious the text was in its use of commas: “Look, John, look.” Maybe in the later volumes there were even semi-colons.

My mother wanted me to learn as quickly as possible so that I could be left to my own literary devices while she got on with more important tasks. A few decades later, parents have learned to think differently: we have a duty not only to get our children to read, but to read to them. So reading aloud, which before the 20th century used to be as natural as reading silently to yourself, has made a comeback. George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s partner, described how he and Eliot were rereading Jane Austen aloud to each other, and thus finding out how brilliant it really was. Reading aloud, he said, meant “no skipping, no evasion of weariness” and was the ultimate test of a novel.

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Fiona Shaw, Medicine, Fifth year, on a park bench. “I love anywhere with a good bench to become lost in my favourite books, the ones that perfectly sum up what you thought was inexpressible.”

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Ayshia Bibi, Pharmacy Mpharm, Second year, another lover of park benches. “I love the escapism of a great book, opening up whole new worlds of opportunities and answers while I’m surrounded by nature.”

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Marc Farre Moutinho, History BA, Fourth year, in the Flaxman Gallery at UCL’s Main Library. “The thought of being surrounded by all these towering bookshelves of incredible writers is just really inspirational.”

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Tammela Platt (UCL English MA 2014) relaxing in Crouch End. “I love to lose myself in the comfort of my bed or a squishy, comfortable armchair.”

Andrew Kolosov, Economics and Business with Eastern European Studies BA, Second year, on Thames Beach near the Tate Modern.

“Reading is, without a doubt, the definitive mechanism for selfdevelopment.”

I remember when my wife and I (pre-children) read aloud to each other. It feels almost twee to admit it. But what we read in this way is fixed in the memory; Lewes had a point. There were the inordinately long, apparently wandering but in fact carefully constructed, sentences of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust (in the course of a year, we got about a fifth of the way through). There were the jaunty ottava rima stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan one winter when each of us in turn was ill in bed. (It reminded me of how, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the self-serious Captain Benwick reads poetry to Louisa Musgrove while she lies recuperating from a head injury – and they end up married, of course.)

When you look at your bookshelf you sometimes get a snatch of your past as well as a memory of what is inside the covers. I can see the volumes of Iris Murdoch that characterised my late teens, when I thought novels should have big themes and big ideas.

(I read The Sea, the Sea again a couple of years ago and could hardly take it seriously.)

Or, from a little earlier in my teens, there are those Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble novels that I read because I thought they would tell me what girls were like. The former, in their Penguin paperback editions, were amongst those books that I bought because of their cover illustrations, artfully shadowed photographs of curves of womanly flesh.

Reading was often more intense than living. It seems to me now that reading fiction was something I felt compelled to do because, from the age of 10, I lived in the Wiltshire countryside. There was simply nothing else to do. Lord of the Rings had evidently been invented for boys who lived an utterly uneventful existence. Even when I graduated to less obviously escapist reading, it seemed to me that many of the novels I read were far more colourful, far more real, than life. I also thought they were the way I would get from childhood to adulthood.

Nowadays there is a large and highly profitable section of “teen fiction” (occasionally more misleadingly labelled “young adult”) in most bookshops. In the 1970s you went straight from Narnia to grown-up stuff. For me, aged 12 or 13, there was an introductory phase of thrillers: my favourite was Alistair MacLean, whose work I devoured, for his clever plots as much as the derring-do. Recently I re-read Bear Island (after growing up in the Highlands, then serving on Arctic convoys, MacLean was good on cold places).

It was, in its way, rather good.

But being really grown up began with Jean-Paul Sartre. Pretentiously enough, his trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom, was my first venture into proper adult fiction.

Thrillingly, my copy of the first volume, The Age of Reason, was confiscated by my housemaster at my Benedictine monastery school. He had not read it, of course, but was alarmed by the mere blurb on the cover: “Paris in 1939: a society of pimps, prostitutes and artists. Mathieu’s mistress tells him that she is pregnant…”, that sort of thing. To my surprise, my mother, when informed, told Father Dennis to return the book to me.

The author had won the Nobel Prize, after all. Clearly, reading was the thing.

Jonathan Swift said, “When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it is as if it were talking to me.” It is like that for me too: every book has its voice, even if the voice is monotonous or flat, even if (this is the most common) it echoes the worn phrasing of something I have read too often before. So when I relish a book it is more because of its voice – its style, its sentences – than because of its content. And for this reason I have always had a shameful resistance to works that have to be read in translation, despite the blessed influence of that Jean-Paul Sartre trilogy. I love Anna Karenina, but feel that I am reading it through some obscuring medium, hearing the translator doing his or her best, rather than hearing Tolstoy or his characters.

Because different writers sound different in my head, there is always a kind of thrill in starting a book, sampling its style. I find this despite the fact that reading is my job rather then my pastime. For even though I find reading intensely and reliably pleasurable, I hardly ever read for pleasure. My reading time is precious because it is how I make a living. So I am always, in a way, reading for pay: I am reading something I will teach, or write about, or review, or give a talk about. Almost never do I read idly or on a whim.

If there is a new book I want to read I try to persuade someone to let me write an article about it. And if there is a classic I want to read I make it a set text on a course that I am about to teach: there, I’ve confessed it.

Professor John Mullan, Head of the English Department, is a writer, critic and broadcaster.

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Words Lucy Jolin Illustrations John Martz

bac k t o t h e future In the 21st century, geeks rule. No wonder then, that science fiction, in all its many genres, is thriving.

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ci-fi. One small word, a vast and everchanging world. It warps into other fields, like popular young adult fiction in the Hunger Games trilogy. It transmogrifies into subgenres such as cli-fi – futuristic fiction about the consequences of climate change. It switches into hyperdrive to go mainstream – see the multibillion-dollar Star Wars and Transformers franchises, just for starters – and it’s suddenly very respectable when it’s taken up by literary legends like Margaret Atwood. But why is sci-fi so enduringly popular?

Jon Turney, science writer and former head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies, says it’s simple. “Who wants to read another bourgeois novel about the adulteries of north London when you could be reading about a new technology with new possibilities in another part of the galaxy?” But perhaps, he adds, it is also something to do with that very adaptability. Sci-fi, says Turney, is probably more diverse than any other genre. “It partakes of all the other genres,” he points out. “It’s a commentary on the present, and often on trends within the present. It leaps from medium to medium – books, comics, films, computer games, they’re all different.”

You could certainly never accuse the genre of being dull. In the imagination of the sci-fi

enthusiast there are robots that do our dirty work, vast space stations and alien races. There are galactic empires and giant civilisations built around worlds of gas, water or fire. There are utopias where our only concern is which gender we decide to be this millennium, and there are postapocalyptic dystopias where our destiny is decided by our genetic code at birth. There are body scanners that pick up any injury or illness with a single swoop and there are computers that know better than we do. And there are new worlds here on earth – virtual reality, where we can be anyone or anything, and cyberspace, the uncharted regions inside the computers on our desks and in our smartphones.

Sci-fi as we know it today is generally agreed to have been born out of the Age of Reason, and there’s a convincing argument for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being the first true sci-fi novel.

But the idea of writing about the future goes even further back. Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, described an ideal, imaginary community where “they have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many.” Opinion is divided as to whether More intended his Utopia to be a genuine outline of a better way to live, or a satire, but as Dr Matthew Beaumont, Senior U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1 33

Lecturer in English, points out, like much sci-fi, it does indeed explore More’s own society.

“We have to gain enough distance on the present in order to see it as we experience it – which is as a sort of jumble with no clear sense of direction, rather than part of some overarching story or grand narrative,” he says. “So sci-fi is a device which we use to understand and interrogate the present and, often, to satirise and socially critique it.

Towards the end of the 19th century, when Jules Verne and HG Wells began writing, the bourgeoisie became increasingly conscious that its own future was not secure. I think that cracked things open and meant that the future became a blank space, a space in which more discontinuous narratives might be inscribed.”

In other words, sci-fi isn’t really about the future: it’s about our own present – and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. Dr Carole Reeves, Senior Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, points to HG Wells’ short story The World Set Free, published in 1914, which explores the consequence of atom bombs being dropped from planes, as emblematic of the way in which the genre explores and anticipates present or near-future events. But while there was quite a strong literary genre of 34 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

sci-fi before the 1950s, it wasn’t until then that the sci-fi film as a genre began. “Films such as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Bodysnatchers, for example, mark a turning point for sci-fi generally,” says Reeves. “Before the 1950s the idea of science was quite positive. But Hiroshima changed all that. People became more sceptical and cynical about what scientists were capable of, and it reminded the world of the power of science.

So sci-fi became much more an interrogation of what science was being used for, and that’s when it exploded. A lot of sci-fi in the cinema became – and is – about what we are doing with the world.”

So although on the surface much sci-fi might seem all about the exotic and the strange, it’s unconsciously familiar to us – not just in the issues it deals with but also in its many worlds.

“Star Wars, for example, gave us desert planets, frozen planets, jungle planets – bits of the Earth put onto other planets, basically,” says geographer Dr James Kneale. “Though there are other places, like the depths of space, which are unimaginable to us. We can see views out of shuttle windows, but we can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a freezing cold vacuum that extends that far.

“What’s interesting about science fiction is that some of the places are really thought

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experiments. Could we survive there? What would it be like? And those, I think, are more interesting.”

There’s another kind of space, too, that we spend more time in than ever: cyberspace, the inner life of computers. It represents, says Kneale, a kind of retreat. “There has been a collapse of the idea that we’re all going to be exploring distant galaxies 100 years from now. There’s a pessimism about technology that wasn’t there before. We haven’t been back to the moon again, let alone gone any further except with robots. There is a lot of argument about what this means. On the whole, people tend to think that we are exploring ourselves – exploring our time, now. We don’t have anything else to base our imagination on.”

The geekery of futuristic technology, naturally, is appealing. But few of us watch Star Trek on repeat because we’re fascinated by the possibility of warp speed. Imagining the technological future can be a risky business, after all, because nothing dates faster than gadgetry.

For every Arthur C. Clarke, pointing out in 1963 that in the future, all that will really matter is communication, there’s a Back to the Future 2 where we’re all on flying hoverboards but still using fax machines. (Though if the story’s great,

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it can be argued, it doesn’t really matter: who cares that Blade Runner’s future contains dashboardmounted videophones but no mobiles?).

In fact, as Reeves points out, a lot of sci-fi is simply a damn good story, with the people always taking a back seat to the technology.

“And people like a good story,” she says.

“Look at films like Independence Day – it’s about a community beating what they think they can’t fight. There’s always got to be that human element.

The audience don’t have to come out of a cinema believing what they’ve seen.”

The shiny robots and imagined gadgets are fun, but it’s the human element, that ability to imagine ourselves in these imagined worlds which are yet so close to our own, that keeps us dreaming about the future. After all, says Turney, “there’s a thing which people in science studies talk about called the technological imaginary.

“One of the things being discussed in a semi-realistic way is geo-engineering; the idea of ‘terraforming’ (making a planet more ‘Earth-like’ and hospitable to Earth-like forms) is a staple of sci-fi, as we used to think that there aren’t that many hospitable planets around. Now it seems there might be if we can get to them, but that’s another story.”

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FE ATUR ES ON BE AUT Y Sussanah Chan, UCL Exhibitions Manager, chooses five beauties from the UCL Collections.

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is there something else going on?

PORTICO investigates.

on beauty Words Lucy Jolin Photographs Marcus Ginns Art Direction Paul Oldman

I

t was -25 degrees and Professor Mark Lythgoe, Director, Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI), was dangling from a rope 5,000m above sea level on the north face of Mount Kenya. He had been climbing for days and his team was now bivouacked on a tiny ledge, trying to get a few hours sleep before attempting the summit. As the sun began to rise, it revealed the African savannah, flat as far as Lythgoe could see until the distant blur of mountaintops on the horizon. The light spread further, illuminating the green jungle canopy, the ink-black rocks and crystalline snow and ice on the mountain.

“Standing where others have not and seeing a view that nobody else has ever seen is one of the most special moments you can have,” he remembers. “I can still see it, the orange sunrise, lighting up these different parts of the earth in concentric rings around us. That beauty will live with me forever. And it is exactly the same buzz when I see an image of the body or brain that’s never been seen before.”

It has long been appreciated that objects of scientific interest have their own, special beauty. (Physicist Richard Feynman controversially claimed, more than 30 years ago, that a scientist can see much more in a flower than an artist). CABI recently displayed its new imaging techniques in a stunning exhibition at the Royal Society, and the results were spectacular – the whorls of colours and textures in the fibres of an injured heart, the delicate, feathery, tree-like structure of the blood vessels in a tumour, cross over into the realms of abstract art.

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Baboon Canopic Jar, Petrie Museum The function of these jars is to store the organs during the mummification process. This Baboon represented the god Hapi and would have been used for the lungs. The serene simple beauty of the baboon’s face and fine craftsmanship of this canopic jar make it a very aesthetically pleasing object.

Wax Anemone Model, Grant Museum Rather than simply being one of the many impressive skeletons and animals from the sprawling Grant Collections, this beautifully crafted wax model would have been created to show people how they would have looked (often they would not have been preserved so well out of the water).

It is a fabulous mix of the beautiful and the unusual.

Malachite, Geology Collection Malachite, formed deep underground, can come in a variety of shades of green, from darkest green to pieces that have yellow in them in light.

This example is a very bold, beautiful green, and has a real tactile quality to it.

Street Scene in the Rain at Night, Woodblock Print, Art Museum This quiet night picture shows a traditional Japanese scene in the dark rain. I have a particular fondness for Japanese prints, and this one evokes a warm ambiance – from the cosy lights and peacefulness – despite the dark, rainy image it depicts.

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FE ATUR ES ON BE AUT Y

And now science, through the relatively recent sub-division of empirical aesthetics known as neuroaesthetics, is seeking its own explanations for exactly where Lythgoe’s “buzz” came from.

It asks what provokes it, how his brain makes that connection between what he sees when gazing at a 3D image from a liver tumour biopsy, and what he sees staring out from a mountainside, so far up that he can see the curvature of the earth.

There’s a caveat, however. “Neuroaesthetics does not address the questions of ‘what is art?’ and ‘what is beauty?’,” says Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics. “People often think it does, but it doesn’t. It does something a lot more important.

It asks: what are the neural mechanisms that allow you to experience beauty?”

Zeki’s recent research, The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates, published in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, examined the question of whether the experience of beauty from mathematics – with its abstract nature – correlated with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that of beauty from other sources, such as visual or musical.

Sixteen mathematicians were given 60 mathematical formulae and asked to rate each one on a scale of one to five according to beauty, while having their brains scanned.

“Visual beauty will engage the visual brain system,” explains Professor Zeki. “The visual brain consists of many specialised areas. So if you’re looking at a beautiful landscape, the area of the brain that is active will be different from the area of the brain that will be active if you are looking at a beautiful portrait, or an abstract painting.

“But when we experience anything as ‘beautiful’, there is also activity in a part of the emotional brain known as the medial orbital-front cortex. And that activity is related to the declared intensity of the experience. In other words, if you tell me that something is extremely beautiful, the intensity of the activity in that area is greater than if you tell me something is mildly beautiful. And we found activity in this same part of the brain when our mathematicians found certain equations beautiful.”

So we know what happens in our brain when we see something beautiful – whatever it might be – but what can explain why we find that thing beautiful in the first place?

Psychology has two very different takes on physical attraction, says Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology and co-author with Dr Viren Swami of The Body Beautiful: Evolutionary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives. The socialisation hypothesis claims that beauty is a learned issue; what we find attractive is passed on through cultures. But the evolutionary theory, currently to the fore, says perception of beauty is all about breeding: widely accepted characteristics of beauty such as clear skin and bright eyes show health and youth, and, therefore, fertility.

“You can design a beautiful woman,” he says. “Of course, there are differences and personal preferences, but generally, if you show people 200 photos and ask them which are the most attractive people and which are the least attractive, there will be more agreements than differences. So men will tend to look for a younger woman who is more likely to be fertile, with a BMI of about 21-22, a waist-hip ratio of .7 and a torso-to-leg ratio of 1.3.

Whereas women will tend to look for a man’s ability to command money, which will protect the possible children, and a good sense of humour which, really, is a code for intelligence.”

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It’s certainly a way of looking at human beauty that our ancestors would have understood. Whereas our perceptions of beauty as it relates to art have changed radically throughout the centuries – it’s hard to see the 15th-century Florentine city fathers who commissioned Michelangelo’s David being able to appreciate Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1937-42) – the laws of attraction, it seems, have not.

“Art in the ancient world was not art as we understand it,” points out Egyptologist and Postgraduate Research Student John J. Johnston. It had very specific magical and religious properties and purposes. When you look at the sculpture of a beautiful woman from the ancient world, she may be fulfilling an entirely different role in our eyes from the role she served for the ancients.”

But, he adds, we can hazard a guess that human nature remains unchanged across the millennia.

There are both fertility and intrinsically sexual aspects to ancient Egyptian depictions of the human form – men, however old they may have been at death, are almost invariably shown in tomb paintings as muscled, young and fit, while women are invariably shown to wear heavy, elaborate wigs, understood to be replete with sexual connotations, and almost transparent, ornately pleated linen dresses.

But should something as objective and hard to define as beauty be the subject of scientific investigation at all? Is beauty a problem to be solved? It’s a profound mistake, says Sebastian Gardner, Professor of Philosophy, to regard beauty as something possessing an essence that awaits scientific determination.

“The experience of beauty has this strange property, in that it seems to bring the object and the subject together in a distinctive way that is not found in an ordinary perception of the world,” he says. “And this is a mystery, by ordinary lights. Common sense has no explanation for it. What the great thinkers such as Kant, Schiller and Hegel have in common is that they see clearly that it’s integral to the aesthetic experience that it should stand out from the ordinary portion of experience. There is something intrinsically puzzling to beauty.

“It’s paradoxical. In one sense, we of course know what beauty is. We grasp it. We couldn’t not do so. In another sense, beauty is opaque to us. Philosophical theories can elucidate beauty adequately, in the sense of explaining why there should be experiences with that distinctive, enigmatic character. But I think neurobiological investigation and evolutionary theory tell us absolutely nothing about the nature of beauty, or aesthetic qualities in general.”

But if beauty is a mystery, so too is the brain. And for the scientists exploring that most impenetrable of organs, the quest for more knowledge has a wonder of its own, which still, it seems, allows for indefinites. “Asking ‘what are the brain areas that correlate with experience of visual beauty?’ is not very different from asking about the brain areas which correlate with your experience of colour,” says Zeki. “The answers both tell you more about the brain.

And this knowledge doesn’t take anything away from you.

It does not de-mystify beauty any more than it de-mystifies the brain. Rather, it reveals something about that most mysterious of organs. You can know all you want to know about the medial orbital-front cortex and it will not take away your experience of beauty. You will still be deeply moved.”

Lunar Orbiter Image of the Earth from the Moon, UCL’s NASA Regional Planetary Image Facility This fantastic shot is the first image of the earth taken from the first Lunar Orbiter missions in 1966.

These unmanned missions were sent to orbit the moon to take mapping images, and this one shows both the surface of the moon and our planet. Images of the planets and moons, of which UCL holds thousands, show the otherworldly beauty of our solar system.

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41 Hello London!

42 South Junction 45 University Matters 46 Reading List 48 London vs World

The iconic entrance court of the Gallery Café in Colombo, an architectural and gastronomical delight.

Hello London!

Channa Daswatte (UCL Bartlett 1991)

A

s an architect living in Sri Lanka, my life is all about experimenting with thoughts and ideas, trying out different styles and designs, and my time at UCL helped shape those ideas. I live in a reasonably cosmopolitan place, with distinct climate and materials, but I still believe London has that edge. Being in the city encouraged

me to find new ideas – not so much visual ones, but deeper ideas about how human beings live and how people enjoy their environment.

Sri Lanka is a former British colony and I’d grown up hearing about all the wonderful things that were in London, so making the choice to study at UCL was easy. But when I arrived I remember thinking London

was so much smaller than I thought it would be. Even the grandest spaces felt more intimate, and therefore more attractive, and much less stuffy than I’d imagined. It was an incredible discovery.

I loved that UCL was in the city and that you weren’t walking through the gates outside the centre. I was tickled by the idea that the university was on the street. It’s something that’s fantastically enriching about UCL – it’s not one little compound, it’s so much a part of London, this great metropolitan city.

Being part of that city was a big draw and it made my life at UCL that much more special. I could get from college to Tottenham Court Road through the British Museum courtyard, and I could visit my favourite works of art and pieces of history, the world’s most wonderful libraries. I found it amazing that you could go to the National Gallery for free.

The Royal Festival Hall is one of my favourite places. We went to tea dances in the basement, the democratic undercroft, with the wonderful staircases floating up above you. It’s a 1950s building, but has a timeless feel.

On my course we only had a few lectures a week, so I spent my days making full use of living in the centre of town and did the required reading at night. I had a grant – a reasonable amount – but I went back to Sri Lanka with nothing because I’d spent it all!

I went to opera, concerts, ballet, shows in the West End, the Barbican. I loved going to the London Contemporary Dance Theatre.

My time in London was the root of a great deal of the confidence I now have; the level of discussions on the course and conversations at the union all gave me a lot of belief in myself and helped me stand up for what I believed in. It was that level of confidence that encouraged me to set up my own practice here in Sri Lanka, something I probably wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for UCL. And even though it’s been 20 years since I studied in London I try to visit every year. It’s my second home.

Of course, it’s changed massively, but there’s still that feeling of familiarity.

It just has different faces. It’s a really friendly and easygoing place: so civilised.

London is the perfect example of what a great city can be and it’s still very much a part of me.

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UCL + SOUTH JU NCTION

Cruciformed medics Medical students have been part of UCL for generations.

But has medical training changed much? Three former medical students compare notes.

Words Penelope Rance Illustration Jimmy Turrell

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Dr Anne Folkes (née Campbell) (UCL Medical School 1963) went on to a career in radiotherapy and oncology and a consultant post in Guildford. She is Chair of the UCL London alumni group.

After 11 years at an all-girls school, I was certainly ready for a change and UC (as it was in those days) certainly gave me that. Our MBBS class numbered 110, but the ratio at the college at the time was 90:10 in favour of men!

We were, of course, teased for being so few – but we girls took it in good part. At a pharmacy class we were studying the effects of atropine on the

eye and drops were put into one of mine – with the result that one pupil was larger than the other. It was the night of the Freshers’ Ball so it caused great amusement, as unequal pupils are a sign of syphilitic infection!

I’d wanted to study medicine since I was quite young and had been a St John Ambulance Cadet. The contact with people was important and I had a fascination for all things scientific.

I was delighted with the choice of UCL and left with a broad education, having been taught and inspired by some remarkable people.

had four Saturday morning lectures, and I remember coming back from an all-night stomp in Chislehurst Caves, selling hotdogs, still with straw in my hair. UCL had extraordinary, highpowered teaching, with more Fellows of the Royal Society than anywhere else in England besides Cambridge University.

And we were just one college.

I do a lot of work arranging regular reunions for the class that matriculated in 1963. There’s 88 of us left, and around 60 attended the 50-years reunion from all over the world – the mugshots never cease to cause high amusement.

To find out more about the UCL London alumni group visit www.ucl.ac.uk/ alumni/groups/london

Dr Orima Kamalu (UCL Medical School 2013) is a junior doctor at St George’s, Tooting. She is a member of the RUMS Alumni Committee.

I always wanted to go to a university with a high reputation and UCL was pretty much top of the list. But medicine wasn’t a life-long ambition. A few years before university, I did work experience in a hospital and started seriously thinking that it was the career for me.

Being a doctor is totally different to how I thought it would be when I was 16, but during the MBBS we were exposed to the realities of work, so now it’s exactly what I expected – not in a bad way, but I’d tell my 16-year-old self it’s not all glamour!

Being a student in London is just fantastic – I can’t imagine having such a good time anywhere else. One of my best memories is of the fourth year show, when the fourth and fifth year MBBS students put on a comedy sketch performance at the Royal Free.

We spent months rehearsing. It was so different, miles away from medicine and everything else I was doing. I did publicity, wrote some songs and even got to sing one of them, which was nerve-wracking.

I joined the alumni organisation because I had such a good time I didn’t want to cut all ties with UCL. It’s a nice way to give back to the University and it’s interesting to see how things are organised behind the scenes. Now I organise events for younger alumni.

We had four Saturday morning lectures, and I remember coming back from an all-night stomp in Chislehurst Caves, selling hotdogs, still with straw in my hair Roger Chapman (UCL Medical School 1968) took up a consultant appointment in obstetrics and gynaecology in Derby, following Senior House Officer, Registrar and Lecturer posts at UCH. There’s a common camaraderie among the clinical students who started in 1963 from those 18 months at UCL when we slogged our guts out to get through the second MB. When I was applying to lots of hospitals in London, most would ask: “Are your parents in medicine; did your father study here?”, but I remember UCL was more omniscient and my decision was entirely vindicated. I’d wanted to do medicine since I was about 12, and I couldn’t wait to get on with clinical theory and get involved with patients.

We were a close group and we got on well with the years above and below, hanging out at the Students’ Union on Huntley Street. Our local was the Lord Wellington, known as the Welly. We

To find out more about the Royal Free UCL Middlesex Medical Schools (RUMS) Alumni Association visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/ alumni/groups/rumsalumni U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1 43

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UCL + U NIV ERSIT Y M AT TERS

AWhatvision for 2034 will the world look like in twenty years’ time?

At UCL, we are laying the groundwork today.

T

he last year, my first as Provost, was a fascinating whirlwind as I immersed myself in this outstanding institution. One cannot fail to be impressed by the sheer quality at every turn. Our radical and rebellious reputation is one that comes from our people and their ideas – our students, staff and alumni.

Defining our new strategy – UCL 2034 – involved engaging such people and recognising the characteristics of the institution that have helped us rise so high. To name a few: research excellence across disciplines, generous and purposeful partnerships both local and global, and – at the root of it all – an outstanding community of students: proudly diverse, drawn from all walks of life and all parts of the world, united by their own excellence, inquisitiveness, ambition and potential.

UCL 2034 captures these characteristics and distils them into several themes: academic leadership grounded in intellectual excellence, with a heavy emphasis on the relationship between research, education and our students; addressing global challenges and delivering impact through innovative partnerships; fostering a lifelong community; and reaffirming our position as an accessible, publicly-engaged institution. To these we can add a renewed emphasis on our relationship with London, not just our backdrop but a global capital city that should confer tremendous advantages to anyone studying or working at UCL. If 2014 was a year for defining the strategy, 2015 is the year to start delivering. On which note, I would like to talk briefly about two projects which have the potential to have a transformational impact on your university.

First, our potential merger with the Institute of Education (IoE) which,

Our radical and rebellious reputation comes from our people and their ideas if it goes ahead, will certainly make headlines. The IoE is among the world’s top-ranked schools focused on educational and quantitative social sciences research, and one that provides fertile ground for new collaborations. UCL students will benefit from engagement with a discipline that is largely new to us, while those currently registered at the IoE will benefit from the tremendous critical mass that exists at UCL, opening up entirely new lines of enquiry.

Second, vying for headline space, our plans for a new campus at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park offer a unique opportunity for UCL to recast our relationship with London. In scale and ambition, this development will

represent a bold new future for the University and the capital – a rare chance to create an entirely new hub for research, education, collaboration, innovation and public engagement.

This development will act as a catalyst for the knowledge-based industries and technologies in which London, and UCL, can lead the world.

On top of such projects, we have returned an outstanding REF 2014 submission and have seen both research and innovation/enterprise grow at great speed. The results are due before the start of 2015, and I am confident that the results will elevate UCL’s status within the UK higher education sector and internationally.

We have also been through a period of transition in our international affairs.

We have recruited exceptional new senior talent in this area, and we are beginning to see a new strategy take shape that will lift our global profile and allow us to fulfil our strapline as London’s Global University.

Essentially, UCL 2034 is about enabling the best students and staff to excel and to facilitate the short-, medium- and long-term benefits they will bring to our activities and reputation.

This is how we will maintain our global standing in higher education and research. When UCL was opened nearly 190 years ago, the first students were reminded that “we have our reputation to acquire; our glory is to come, and must come from you”.

From lofty positions in global league tables we might say this glory has come already. But, UCL is a deeply impressive place – one in which our proudest achievements are not in the past but are in the here and now; today and, with UCL 2034 as our guide, even more so in our future.

Professor Michael Arthur UCL President and Provost U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1 45

UCL + BOOKS

Reading List PORTICO asks UCL

academics to choose their favourite books.

Interviews Kate Hilpern Illustrations Hanna Melin

Beloved

by Toni Morrison This book is one I have read and reread for many years. It is a historical novel about the immediate aftermath of American slavery, told with both foreground and background.

It is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped to freedom in Ohio from slavery in Kentucky in 1856, but who, facing capture later that year under the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her young daughter rather than see her returned to slavery.

In the novel, which is named after the daughter, it appears that the daughter comes back to haunt the mother.

I like the author’s eye for detail, the intensity of her focus on this tragedy of 1856 and, strange as it must sound, the sense of humour that underpins the narration. She is careful to reveal the central incident indirectly and slowly in fragments that, along with most other 46 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

parts of the story, must be reassembled in order for the story to make sense.

The novel is thus an absorbing but challenging read. And when reread, it keeps giving you things you haven’t seen in it before.

Its storytelling techniques are regarded as post-modern because they are so varied, but in fact this variety is no more than a reflection of perspectives on the same incident, as witnessed or discussed by the many different people in the story.

A good novel should draw in any reader regardless of his or her background. Mine is certainly different, but I think that this novel is one of the finest I have read. It is an intellectual as well as emotional challenge.

Professor Richard North was born in Oxford and lived and studied in Cambridge and Groningen. He came to UCL in 1989, where he has since taught English literature, specialising in Beowulf, Chaucer and Old Norse.

The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker From the very moment I opened it, The Mezzanine tantalised me. The temptation to wolf it down in one greedy sitting was strong, but the deliciousness of rereading the first few lines, of lingering in, rather than skimming over, the details of the footnotes was even stronger.

The Mezzanine chronicles (and extends) the often hilarious undercurrents of our quotidian thought processes, the bizarre footnotes buzzing away at the edges of our minds, as we physically go about our daily lives.

It is an exploration and celebration of the infra-ordinary on a literary canvas often dedicated to the epic. In this way, and many others, it is a strikingly singular, funny and precociously clever novel.

Critics have compared it to the work of Proust. But this is misleading

because it’s really, really short, and as much about anonymity as individuality.

It focuses on one lunch hour in an unnamed office building in an unnamed city, and its protagonist, Howie, is in many ways easily replaceable. For me, Baker’s innovative use of footnotes is fascinating as a way into the weightier, magisterial work of David Foster Wallace.

Among the aspects of The Mezzanine that resonate deeply with me is the inimitable nature of the narrative voice. The prose is unmistakeably that of Nicholson Baker. Another is the ability to twin this strength of prose style with a potentially mundane or non-literary subject. The Mezzanine achieves both with wit and intelligence.

Dr Nick Shepley is a Teaching Fellow in English 20th Century Literature. He is the organiser of One Day in the City, a bi-annual celebration of literature and London at UCL that will next take place in 2016.

The Golden Bowl

by Henry James The Golden Bowl, which is one of James’s big three late novels, sees him return to the subject he’d written about at the beginning of his career: rich Americans in a sophisticated Europe.

But it is far more ironic and self-aware.

You could describe it as romance with a very tough edge.

It is a world where everyone is manipulating everyone else and where many things go unsaid. James’s handling of these silences, to my mind, is quite brilliant – a bit like the way secrets work in Dickens, but more refined.

Particularly interesting is the way that James refuses to make moral judgements that would have been standard in the Victorian novel.

He never uses the word “adultery”, for example. It’s a kind of fluid moral experiment – observing how the situation works itself out without imposing the usual categories.

James’s late style is famously difficult and demands the kind of attention that we’re unused to these days – and I include myself in that. But for those who manage the immersion it requires, it is immensely rewarding.

Philip Horne is a Professor in the English Department. He is the author of Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (OUP, 1990); editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and James’s The Portrait of a Lady (all Penguin). He was also coeditor of Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (Manchester UP, 2008). He is the founding General Editor of the Complete Fiction of Henry James for Cambridge University Press.

Seven Years in Tibet

By Heinrich Harrer

translated from the German by Richard Graves I recently decided on a whim to travel to Tibet this autumn. Flights booked, I tried to appease my excitement by reading as much as I could about the Land of Snows. This was the first book I came across.

I’d seen the 1997 film adaptation (made famous, in part, by Brad Pitt’s appearance) and I remembered its dazzling panoramas, and breathtaking evocation of height and space. The book is certainly full of sublime vistas, but in other respects proved very different from the film. It is, for instance, markedly reticent about

Harrer’s personal life. But what it holds back in human interest it amply makes up for in its crisp, often funny, observations of every aspect of Tibetan life and culture.

The book is a riveting kaleidoscope of foreign scenes. The place names (Nvenchen Tanglha, Norbulinka, Tashilhunpo) have a magic all of their own and the pages swarm with yaks, yak-butter, yak-skin boats, yak-hair tents, leopards, dzos and elephants, monks and serfs, superstition and ritual, colour and incense.

The memoir is candid about some of the less exalting realities of life in Tibet – the poverty and hardship of nomadic life, the dirt, the extreme conservatism of the country’s ruling monks. But throughout it is clear that this is the view of an enthralled, if occasionally baffled explorer. I’d highly recommend it to anyone with a taste for travel narratives or an interest in mountaineering and exploration.

Dr Scarlett Baron is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century British and American Literature. Her principal research interests are in modernist literature – especially James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gustave Flaubert – and in the history of critical theory.

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UCL + STUDENT LIFE

London vs World Sarah Jeffs (UCL

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Natural Sciences MSci 2014) explains why the King of Falafel, Camden, takes the pitta.

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Photograph Alun Callender

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ancel the air ticket. Unpack your bags. The humble concoction of chickpea and spice may hail from the Middle East, but in my opinion to sample the best falafel in the world you need journey no further than… Camden, and the King of Falafel.

For students, the hunger pangs on the way home at silly o’clock in the morning are a common experience.

And whether you were at the halls on Camden Road, lived amongst the punks and the markets, or were simply a fan of the fact that it has a pub on virtually every corner, Camden draws in many a UCL student. The high street is a mecca for late night solutions to your desperate want for something tasty.

So why is the King of Falafel, quite simply, late-night eating establishment royalty and a UCL institution? It could be the sheer diversity of delicacies on offer, from chips and various kebabs to a whole variety of different, authentic chilli sauces. But delicious as these are, 48 U C L P O R T I C O | 2 014 /15 | I S S U E 1

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The King of Falafel is more than just a vendor of everything your heart desires... smothered in sauce and served with chips and salad it is the falafel that really brings in the crowds. And no wonder. Perfectly crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, these chickpeas have been transformed into heavenly little balls of goodness.

But the King of Falafel, right opposite Camden Town tube station, is more than just a vendor of everything your heart desires, wrapped up, smothered in sauce and served with chips and salad. This place has a familiar and comforting atmosphere.

This is in part due to very enthusiastic staff, but owes as much to the fact that, more than likely, you will bump into fellow students, someone you met by the bar or somewhere in the queue on a previous night out.

Importantly, this establishment is un-waveringly loyal. Not for its customers is the angst caused by a shattered dream of chips never eaten: the King remains open all night. By which I really mean well into the day, having visited this establishment post 6am after a very late finishing summer ball, and frequently at other rather antisocial hours.

For the combination of quality food, atmosphere and a willingness to cater to hunger pangs around the clock, the King of Falafel reigns supreme.

So should you end up passing through Camden with a desire for a late-night food adventure, you know what to do.

Sarah Jeffs is a CASE intern at UCL.