How to Produce Comedy Bronze, Jon Plowman

College is delighted to present a look at the incredible range of recent Alumni publications.

Professor Michael C Jackson OBE (1970, PPE) published Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity in March 2019. The book is sub-titled “responsible leadership for a complex world”.

Jon Plowman (1971, English) published How to Produce Comedy Bronze about his life in broadcasting and comedy in particular. He produced Absolutely Fabulous, The Vicar of Dibley, The Office, W1A, Fry and Laurie and Bottom, to name but a few. The book includes a foreword by Dawn French.

Professor Raymond Wacks (1971, Law), Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Hong Kong, published Protecting Personal Information: The Right to Privacy Reconsidered (Hart Publishing, 2019).

Professor Mervyn Frost (1972, Politics), Professor of International Relations in the Department of War Studies at Kings College, London, published Practice Theory and International Relations, co-authored with Dr Silviya Lechner (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Strategy, Evolution, and War, Dr Kenneth Payne

In White Eagle over Wimbledon, journalist and historian John Phillips (1973, History) tells how his father, Ireneusz Filipowicz, fought in the Polish Resistance as a teenager and became the first recorded Cold War defector from Poland in a daring escape from the Russian secret police before arriving in Britain.​

Dr Nick Smith (1976, Education and English) published Bridge and the Romantics, the first and third chapters of which are set in Univ of the 1810s. The story focuses on two Univ alumni, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg. His play, The Battle of Fyfield, has been published by Beercott Books.

Paul Armstrong (1984, PPE) published Why Are We Always On Last?: Running Match of the Day and Other Adventures in TV and Football (Pitch Publications). Armstrong spent almost three decades at BBC television, about half of that time spent as the Editor of Match of the Day. The book chronicles his experiences, and includes a foreword by Gary Lineker.

In their new book, Brexit and British Politics, leading analysts of UK and EU politics, Professor Anand Menon (1984, History and Modern Languages), and Geoffrey Evans tease out the long-term factors that culminated in the British decision to leave the European Union.

Good Girls, Amanda Brookfield

Dr Sara Lodge (1994, English), Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, published Inventing Edward Lear, (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Dr Kenneth Payne (1996, International Relations), Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and Senior Member of St Antony’s College, Oxford published Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2018).

Dr Lindsay G. Driediger-Murphy (2005, Classics), Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary in Canada, published Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Good Girls by Amanda Brookfield (1979, English), Univ’s Visitor in the Creative Arts 2018-19, tells the story of the Keating sisters through a childhood fraught with secrets, adolescent rivalries, and on into adulthood with all its complexities and misunderstandings.

Alumni publications from earlier in 2019 can be see here, whilst those from Univ’s academics can be see here.

Published: 11 October 2019

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