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Teachers and professionals working with children and young people will have new support and guidance to lead the way in cracking down on violence against women and girls, the Government announced today on International Women’s … (2010/0058)
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- Buckinghamshire; Cornwall; Gateshead; Lincolnshire; Oxfordshire and Sutton get green-light for latest round of BSF projects … (2010/0060)
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- Schools Minister Vernon Coaker has today announced nearly £7 million of extra funding to help secure progress at ten schools across the country. (2010/0059)
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Distinguished classical scholar and academic who broke new ground with his book Greek Homosexuality

Sir Kenneth Dover, who has died aged 89, was a towering figure in the study of ancient Greek language, literature and thought. Very few could approach the range and quality of his scholarship, especially his synthesis of philological, historical and cultural acumen. His name became known to a wider public partly for his groundbreaking 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality, and partly for the publication of his controversial autobiography, Marginal Comment, in 1994.

Greek Homosexuality treated the topic with unprecedented openness and nuanced definition. The work drew together the evidence of literature (not least a prosecution speech in a sensational Athenian court case); visual art (Dover inspected hundreds of sexually explicit vase-paintings, often in the basements of museums); and history, mythology and philosophy. The result was a compelling picture of the complex web of sexual and social practices that constituted the phenomena now grouped together under the label of Greek homosexuality.

The book proved a turning-point in the modern study of ancient sexual cultures, leading to the growth of this field in the 1980s (and not just among specialists – Michel Foucault was among those influenced by it). Later in life, Dover was sometimes impatient that the subject had become an academic industry and that Greek Homosexuality had become the best known of his works, partly occluding what he felt to be his own central achievement as a historian of the Greek language. But the book is deservedly admired for harnessing scholarly sophistication to a shrewd and broad-minded historical imagination. If parts of Dover’s argument have been challenged in relation to the kind of weight given to different sorts of evidence, the book remains an indispensable resource.

Dover was born in London and educated at St Paul’s school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics. He showed an early fascination for the varieties and intricacies of language, going so far as to teach himself the grammar of some Pacific languages as an adolescent. A capacity for close, subtle investigation of what linguistic usage can reveal about the fabric of human experience was to remain his hallmark, but he distanced himself from theoretical linguistics (as he put it, “my attempts to read Chomsky are enfeebled by the rapid onset of boredom”).

His undergraduate studies were suspended for war service in the Western Desert and Italy, bringing him into contact with working-class soldiers whose unpretentious attitudes made a lasting impact, he maintained, on his conception of life even in Greek antiquity. He returned to Oxford in 1945 to continue an academic trajectory illuminated by a succession of prizes and scholarships. In 1948 he began doctoral study under the great historian Arnaldo Momigliano (who later said there was nothing he could teach Dover), but this was overtaken by appointment to a fellowship of Balliol in the same year.

In the early 1950s, he began to specialise in Greek comic drama, historiography and oratory, three areas in which he was to become a world authority. When he left Balliol in 1955 for the chair of Greek at St Andrews, it was with the general expectation that he would succeed Eric Dodds (author of The Greeks and the Irrational) to the Regius chair in Oxford; but when that opportunity was presented in 1960, family considerations led him to decline it. He remained at St Andrews until 1976 (and was subsequently chancellor from 1981 to 2005). During his two decades as professor there he became the finest Hellenist of his generation in Britain and the author of a succession of books, including commentaries on Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds and on parts of Thucydides’s History.

Always a polished stylist and, in his prime, an assured lecturer, Dover was capable of adapting his expertise for very different audiences, even if a 1980 BBC television series on the Greeks was blighted by maladroit directing. The Greeks, a book commissioned in connection with the series, distils many of his guiding ideas for students and general readers, while Greek Word Order (1960) is an exhibition of formidably meticulous analysis on a subject so improbably specialised to some eyes that its title has sometimes been “corrected” to Greek World Order.

Highly characteristic of Dover’s methods and mentality was Greek Popular Morality (1974), an attempt to reconstruct the value system of 4th-century BC Athens from the various argumentative strategies used by orators in the city’s courts and political assembly. This work brought out his concern to try to understand the Greeks in realistic rather than idealised terms. His complementary suspicion of abstractions engendered an impatience with philosophical aspirations (not least Plato’s) which was one of his few intellectual weaknesses.

Dover became president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1976, was knighted the following year, and in 1978 published Greek Homosexuality, subsequently translated into several languages. The later years of Dover’s career included two volumes of collected papers; a commentary on Aristophanes’s The Frogs; and The Evolution of Greek Prose Style (1997), a difficult but searching essay on historical stylistics. Dover’s presidency of the British Academy (1978-81) was marked by contention over Anthony Blunt’s fellowship after Blunt’s exposure as a Soviet spy. While privately favouring Blunt’s expulsion, Dover felt obliged, in the interests of the Academy’s unity, to maintain public even-handedness, a policy which made him the target of animosity from opposing camps. He was more trenchant in declaring his own convictions when, at Oxford in 1985, he lent open support for the opposition to a proposed honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher.

The same year brought to a head a protracted problem in Corpus over the unstable conduct of Trevor Aston, a history fellow whose disputes with the college led Dover to wonder, as he expressed it in his autobiography, “how to kill him without getting into trouble”. When Aston did kill himself, Dover felt immense relief, which he described with ruthless honesty in Marginal Comment. This frankness, which soured his relations with certain Corpus fellows, shocked some people, as did the book’s occasional passages of personal sexual detail. But Dover had taken a principled decision to write an autobiography in the confessional mode, one of the oldest traditions of the genre. The furore over certain aspects of Marginal Comment obscured its attempt to explore the motivations and passions that had shaped a life of academic inquiry at the highest level.

The value of Dover’s remarkable body of work lies not just in its consummate linguistic and historical adeptness, but in its fusion of these qualities with an insight that never ceased to find the whole gamut of human behaviour worthy of attention. To a degree extremely rare among top-rank academics, Dover was interested in all dimensions of life – from the sounds of people’s voices to the largest ideas which inform their actions in the world. He was exemplary not for his pursuit of a method or ideology (he was scrupulously undidactic) but for the finesse with which he displayed how the best historical thinking can fuse technical excellence with deeply reflective understanding. His death marks the end of an era in classical scholarship.

His wife Audrey, whom he married in 1947, died last year. He is survived by their children Alan and Catherine.

• Kenneth James Dover, academic, born 11 March 1920; died 7 March 2010

• This article was amended on 9 March 2010. The original stated that Audrey Dover died earlier this year. This has been corrected.

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As a boy, he walked into Keele University – and never left. And he counts bishops, sportsmen and politicians among his friends. So just who is Neil Baldwin?

Last weekend, Keele University celebrated Neil Baldwin’s 50th anniversary there. It was a splendid two-day affair, with speeches from distinguished alumni, a dinner, a testimonial football match, and a service of thanksgiving for his work conducted by the Bishop of Lichfield, a Keele graduate.

But Baldwin has never worked at Keele in any capacity, or been a student there, or had any formal connection with the place. He walked into the students’ union in 1960, an engaging schoolboy with learning difficulties from the local town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and became a fixture. “I liked the campus and the chapel and the people,” he tells me on the phone.

When, four years later, Malcolm Clarke walked nervously into the students’ union on his first day at university, this stout, jovial young man ambled towards him and said: “Welcome to Keele. I’m Neil Baldwin.” Clarke says today: “I appreciated his warm welcome, but who exactly was he? As always with Neil, his exact status was unclear.”

Most Anglican bishops have met Baldwin at least once. A keen churchgoer, he turns up at their homes for tea like an old friend, and, though a little puzzled, that’s how they treat him. At a thanksgiving in the Keele chapel a few years ago for Baldwin’s work there, the visiting vicar recounted how he had first met Baldwin 20 years before, while at theological college in London. “He seemed to know all the bishops,” he said.

Clarke became the student union president in the turbulent year of 1968, when Keele students occupied the registry. Clarke opposed the action and resigned as president over it, but not before proposing Baldwin for honorary life membership of the student union. For that, at least, he got unanimous support. I too was there in the late 60s and remember Baldwin as a solid if enigmatic figure. I’m pretty sure we first met in the union bar, late at night. In 1974, Clarke became mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and on the day of his inauguration, Baldwin sat beside him in the back of the mayoral Daimler, waving regally at puzzled bystanders.

As the 70s closed, Keele appointed a new vice-chancellor and Baldwin phoned Clarke, by then living in Manchester, to give him the news. “It’s Professor David Harrison of Cambridge,” he said, “and ‘e’s a very nice man.” “A very nice man” is one of Baldwin’s most frequently imitated phrases; he says it emphatically, and as though there’s a D in the middle of “very”.

“Do you know him then?” asked Clarke. “I’ve just had tea with him and his wife in Cambridge,” replied Baldwin. Clarke now says, rather carefully: “I think Professor Harrison may have been under the impression Neil was the Anglican chaplain.”

Baldwin’s Keele student friends thought he was fantasising when he talked about his friendships with Kevin Keegan, Gordon Banks, Graham Taylor and other famous footballers, until one day a well-known member of the Stoke City squad dropped him off at the student union, having given him a lift home from an away game. When Clarke met the players, they told him they knew Baldwin well – but had doubted his stories of his friendship with the mayor of Newcastle.

Eventually, Baldwin became a regular fixture on the Stoke City team coach for away matches. He makes it sound terribly simple. “I met Lou Macari [Stoke manager in the 1990s and a former Scottish international] outside the ground and we got talking. He made me the team’s kit man.” It sounds as though it can’t be true, but it’s confirmed in Macari’s autobiography, Football, My Life, which has seven pages about Baldwin. Macari treated him as a kind of mascot, getting him to dress up and sit on the touchline for the amusement and morale of his squad – once in a chicken suit, another time in full white tie and tails.

Macari, like Clarke, grew to love him. He and Baldwin were often seen together in Stoke, walking Macari’s dog. And one day in 1993, during a friendly against Aston Villa at Villa Park, Baldwin’s old friends among the Stoke supporters saw him, in full Stoke kit, warming up on the touchline. With five minutes to go in the match, Macari actually sent this rather overweight man of nearly 50 on to the pitch. The players on both sides and the referee must have been in on the plan, because Macari then had 12 players on the pitch – and the players passed the ball to Baldwin, who almost got a shot at goal.

In his autobiography Macari calls him “my best-ever signing”. Baldwin’s unselfconscious remarks were a constant source of amusement for the players, and did wonders for morale. They never paid him properly as kit man, but have now given him free entrance to Stoke games for life. Baldwin says Macari is “a very nice man”.

The late John Golding MP used to tell a story about how he walked into the House of Commons restaurant one night and saw Tony Benn, then energy secretary, at a table with Baldwin. Golding was a Keele graduate and MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, so he knew him well. Golding was also the Labour right wing’s chief fixer, and he loathed Benn with a passion, so he left swiftly before either of them saw him. He never worked out how Baldwin had got the energy secretary to invite him to dinner.

It was quite simple. Baldwin had come to the House of Commons and put in a card for Benn saying, “Neil Baldwin from Keele – friend of Steve’s.” “Steve” was Tony Benn’s son Stephen, and Baldwin was not making it up. Like many Keele graduates, Stephen Benn keeps in touch with Baldwin to this day.

Stories about Baldwin abound, and they are almost always true. He once sold a Keele rag magazine to then prime minister Harold Wilson and buttonholed the Duke of Edinburgh for a chat about world problems. He wrote on spec to an American oarsman who was in the Cambridge boat race crew one year, and got himself on board the official launch that followed the race and into the boat-race ball afterwards.

“Neil’s complete lack of self- consciousness has made him many genuine friendships with the famous,” says Clarke. “People say he’s a fantasist, but he isn’t – he turns his fantasies into reality.”

As a young man he had an unskilled job in the pottery industry in Stoke, and in the 80s he travelled as Nello the Clown in Sir Robert Fossett’s circus. His other travels were aided by his habit of putting on a clerical collar before hitching lifts. His mother, Mary, used to worry about how he would cope after her death and sensibly made him move into his own flat; she died a few years ago, and Baldwin is managing.

People are always willing to help him, because, says Clarke “there’s not an ounce of malice in him”. Every generation of Keele students for 50 years has looked after Baldwin, and he in turn has enriched their lives with his extraordinary adventures. Generations of Keele students, including Stephen Benn, have played in the Neil Baldwin Football Club, of which he is the manager and captain, and in which he wins Player of the Year every year. Clarke calls it “a motley collection of students of the day, managed, coached, captained and kit-managed by Neil”.

Now his footballing days are probably over. He is 64 this month and will go into hospital this year to have two new hips. He may continue to train his team, though. “I’ve always been grateful to the people at Keele,” Baldwin says in his calm, gravelly voice with its strong Potteries accent. “The students have always been wonderful, they are still good friends to me.”

Baldwin’s old friend Malcolm Clarke now chairs the Football Supporters Federation and is the supporters’ representative on the Football Association council. The two meet regularly at Stoke City matches.

Clarke and Keele alumni officer John Easom want the university to give Baldwin an honorary degree, as do many Keele graduates, including me. “He has contributed a lot more to the university than most people who get honorary degrees,” says Clarke. For the moment the university establishment is resisting. Clarke has even bigger ambitions: he wants Baldwin to have an honour. He plans to petition Gordon Brown. It might just work. There could be votes in it. And it can only be a matter of time before I hear Baldwin say that “he’s a very nice man”.

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As parents struggle to answer GCSE-level questions, are you confident helping with your children’s schoolwork?

Despite claims that exams are getting easier, a survey has shown that parents struggle to answer GCSE-level questions. Faced with 10 questions based on the curriculum in science, maths, history and geography, they managed to get an average of just two correct answers. The results of the quiz, taken by 500 people with children under 16, suggest that helping teenagers with their homework could be beyond the capabilities of many parents.

The parents were asked about subjects including the name of the bars on a synoptic chart (isobars), the total number of degrees in the exterior angles of an octagon (360) and the number of chromosomes in a human cell (46).

If you’re a parent with school-age children, how has the curriculum changed since you were at school? Do you feel confident helping with homework, or does it leave you scratching your head?

• This article was amended at 16:10 on 9 March 2010. The original made reference to the angles of an octagon – it should have specified “exterior angles“. This is now been corrected. D- for us

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Targets for getting young people into higher education should be scrapped and top-up fees raised, say graduate recruiters.
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TV documentaries like the Seven Ages of Britain fill in the gaps left by a “less impressive” school curriculum, says David Dimbleby.
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The winner of the Ig Nobel prize demonstrates how her gas mask bra could save lives

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The idea of making history with Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy over in the end – that along with the authenticity of The Hurt Locker and a clever awards campaign

Avatar and The Hurt Locker entered Sunday’s Oscar ceremony like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and a dinghy bound for the same chunk of promised land. The seemingly mismatched opponents were the lead contenders for the major prizes outside the acting categories (Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner was a deserving nominee but it was always going to be Jeff Bridges’s night) and, of course, there was the added spice factor of marital history.

James Cameron glided into the 82nd annual Academy Awards at the helm of Avatar, Golden Globulised six weeks earlier in the best director and picture categories and, lest we forget, the biggest movie of all time. Here was a man whose films are so vast they dispense with definite articles and need only trade on one-word titles; the cinematic equivalent of Oprah, Madonna or Beckham. Here was a movie whose .5bn(£167bn)-and-counting box office is two-thirds the size of what Fiji’s purchasing power was in 2009. Many believed the major Oscars were Cameron’s to lose. But they hadn’t reckoned on his former missus.

Kathryn Bigelow, a gifted storyteller and action director who had previously served up guilty pleasures such as Point Break, Blue Steel and the truly sensational, much misunderstood Strange Days, proved to be a force. Her latest, The Hurt Locker, refused to capsize in Avatar’s monstrous wake and gamely stayed the course throughout the awards season. Despite only grossing .7m at the north American box office (the lowest grossing best picture winner ever – Summit Entertainment is considering a re-release), the thriller had become a critical darling, hailed as the best Iraq war film to come out of the US, and indeed the best visceral slice of war on screen in many a year.

Critics are so far removed from commercial sensibilities they might as well be living on Avatar’s planet Pandora. This worked to the advantage of The Hurt Locker. Their steadfast belief in the anti-blockbuster allowed it to gain momentum so that, despite the Golden Globes shut-out, it had already reached the status of serious Oscar hopeful. As the season wore on, and more and more critics’ groups across the US – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, to name a few – rewarded Bigelow and The Hurt Locker, its star continued to rise.

As the awards season entered February, voters agreed privately they had had enough of the blue-skinned giants. My own decidedly unscientific poll of a small number of Academy members who spoke on condition of anonymity was revealing. Avatar had reaped sufficient rewards, they said, and it was time to honour a movie that made them think, moved them, and embodied a sense of timeliness and timelessness.

Academy voters are a sentimental lot and the idea of making history is alluring. Enter awards specialist Cynthia Swartz of PR agency 42West. Hired by Summit Entertainment, Swartz devised a campaign that rightly cast Bigelow as a brilliant director who could hold her own in a man’s world while raising the prospect of the first female director to win an Oscar. The idea was intoxicating and I can attest to the speed with which it coursed through Hollywood’s bloodstream. Within a day of the nominations on 2 February, there was barely talk of anything else.

For the record, Swartz also got people talking about the man who started it all. Screenwriter Mark Boal was inspired by his time as a journalist embedded with US troops to write about his experiences. He would also win an Oscar on Sunday and introduced a valuable element of authenticity to the story, one that was potent enough to ensure that the usual 11th-hour sprinkling of ill-founded lawsuits and threats of plagiarism that besmirch almost every Oscar race largely fell on deaf ears. Besides, the members had already voted by the time most of the crackpots came out of the woodwork.

Swartz ensured that Academy voters received swanky DVD screeners. The critics awards kept on coming. Then on 31 January Bigelow became the first woman to clinch the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) award. By now the sense of history in the making was irresistible. The winner of the DGA has gone on to win the best directing Oscar on all but six occasions since the Guild launched its annual prize in 1948. The Bafta ceremony was a confidence booster, a dress rehearsal for what was to come, and by the time Barbra Streisand took to the stage at the Kodak theatre on Sunday to present the Academy award for best director, Cameron must have been shrinking in his seat. To be fair, the two remain on good terms, and he looked genuinely pleased for Bigelow when his ex-wife’s name was read out. Cameron is probably pleased for everybody these days – so would you be if you’d just made the biggest movie of all time and earned a personal fortune in the region of 5m.

The Academy loves an epic, and on Sunday that epic was the story of David v Goliath. The best picture Oscar, The Hurt Locker’s sixth on the night following other senior honours such as Boal’s screenplay award and the editing prize, was a fitting finale for a plucky movie that deserved to be seen by a wider public audience. Thanks to a smart awards campaign it was seen by a wide audience of critics and awards voters, and in the end, that was all that counted.

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