Thomas Gradgrind - from Hard Times - is one of Charles Dickens's coldest characters and is the twelth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters. Granada's critically acclaimed ...

Thomas Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, is obsessed with unambiguous facts and numbers. When I asked a press officer at HMRC for an estimate of how many “open cases” it plans to write off, ...

So many of life's questions seem never to be answered. Are we alone? Why are we here? What's it all about, Alfie? But one man has set out to provide specific, concrete answers to life's rhetorical ...

ON April 8 we were told it would take #510m to set up in a free Scotland the kind of DSS bureaucracy we thole today. Surely the real question is why not simplify and streamline social security ...

Charles Dickens' Hard Times is very much a novel of its times, and yet page after page seems written as a direct commentary on our own. It's not Dickens' finest work, but it may be one of his most ...

Lookingglass returns to its 2001 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s allegorical tale of yearning in an Industrial Age mill town. With its stark juxtaposition between the free-living world of the circus ...

In Guyana education once deteriorated to the point where parents had little confidence that the formal system would or could produce results. This created a condition in which parental paranoia ...

Children with special educational needs are being excluded to boost exam results. That’s not a healthy approach There was a boy in my rural primary school who we used to tease as the village idiot. He ...

Easter is traditionally the time for one or other of the teaching unions — why are there so many of them? — to behave like March hares and carry on as if education, education, education, out of which ...

Mr. Gradgrind is the alter ego of Paul Brians, professor of English at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, who sets out to provide specific, concrete answers to life's rhetorical ...