"It was terrible," he says, and adds that, on his first essay, an "eminent Oxford historian had written, 'This is a dog's dinner.' There were two ways to go after that, either give up or… " He went on to do a second history degree at Swansea before securing the Bectu job.
In an interesting essay on Crane's religious beliefs Gary Sloan quotes a comment the young writer made to an acquaintance: "I was a socialist for two weeks, but when a couple of socialists assured me I had no right to think differently from any other socialist and then quarrelled with each other about what socialism meant, I ran away".
He laid about Chris Anderson's airy invocation of internet connectedness as though critiquing a disappointing undergraduate essay.
The only problem is that the New College story appears to be false, or as the college's archivist Jennifer Thorp put it back in 2008, in an essay about the tale, a "myth".
"Most of the time, getting a job purely because you're a little person … is not a good thing," Jane wrote in an essay on her blog.
Recently Ensign asked the girls to write an essay describing what education meant to them.
"When we were set our first essay, we were given a 10-page guide to referencing, which was a bit daunting.
Considered alongside a line from the new essay collection by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Is It My Body? – "The body's not theirs anymore," she writes of rock stars.
A delight also to find Ken Worpole and Jason Orton's important text and image essay The New English Landscape (Field Station); Vagabond Witness (Zero Books), Paul Gordon's beautifully written advocacy of the great Victor Serge; and the wondrous book-length concertina poem/portrait collaboration Correspondences by Anne Michaels and painter Bernice Eisenstein (Bloomsbury).
Two weeks ago, I belatedly started reading Mammon's Kingdom, an extended essay about the modern British condition by the political philosopher and sometime MP David Marquand.
The ThingLink resource can then be used next lesson as a starter activity, essay writing prompt, revision tool or visual trigger to reinforce learning – all of which students can access on their mobile devices.
