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Head's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Head, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • Head's Address at Prize Giving, 1st July 2021

    Well done for concentrating so well this afternoon.  With everything that has been going on in the last couple of weeks, not to mention all the challenges of the last fifteen months, I am not surprised that everyone feels the need for a break – even if we may not be able to...
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  • Questions, Questions, Questions

    I will start this week with a few final thoughts from Tim Harford’s book ‘Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy’.  As you may have noticed from last week’s offering, Harford quite often references China in his writing, with a very clear sense that...
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  • We Do Not See the World as It Is: We See It as We Think It Is

    Photo: Aristotle.  De Agostini Picture Library \ Universal Images Group The title of this week’s blog is a quotation from Aristotle, which is getting on for 2,500 years old.  No wonder that his philosophy and science were so enduring, with much of it providing the founda...
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  • It Was Good While It Lasted

    Picture: Seven Ages of Man woodcut, The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group. I will start this week with a couple of quotations from US president Harry S. Truman.  Firstly, he once said, ‘You know what makes good leadership?  It’s the ability to get men to do wh...
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  • All Roads Lead to Bill Bryson

    Picture: Peter Jackson / Bridgeman Art Library / Universal Images Group There has been a consistent theme in my recent reading about the development of societies and the inequalities and consequences that their creation brings.  For example, in his history of cheese-making, Ned Pal...
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  • Over the Moon or Sick as a Parrot?

    ‘It’s not the despair, Laura.  I can take the despair.  It’s the hope I can’t stand.’  This quotation would make a good quiz question.  Who said it and where?  It was John Cleese’s character, Brian Stimpson, in the film Clockwise...
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  • Beware the Witch Hunt

    I ran out of words last week to finish off a final thought from ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, so I will start with them this week.  By coincidence, issues relating to free speech at universities are highl...
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  • The Right Child on the Right Road

    Given that it is probably my favourite line from the whole Blackadder series, I must surely have mentioned before the imploration from Edmund to Baldrick to think for himself and not to rely on others for all his views and ideas, finishing with the superlative put down: ‘For you, Baldrick, the...
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  • Say Cheese

    Photo: David R. Frazier / Photo Researchers / Universal Images Group.   A strong candidate from left field for the best book I’ve read for a while comes in the form of ‘A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles’ by Ned Palmer.  On reflecti...
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  • Is Knowledge Really Power?

    Photo: Universal Images.   Given that people cannot agree whether it should be ‘scientia potentia est’ or ‘scientia est potentia’ or ‘scientia potestas est’, or whether this phrase comes from the...
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  • The Future Might Be Rubbish

    Photo: Science and Society Museum/ Universal Images Group. To describe my Easter break as quiet would be something of an understatement, but I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to unwind, have very little contact with the outside world and switch off from the tyranny that email see...
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  • Origins - For Good and Ill

    I took so long last week explaining how I came to own a copy of Origins that I ran out of time to share as much of it as I had intended.  As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, particularly the more anthropological aspects about how the environment of the planet shaped...
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