Sep 12, 2026
Author Spotlight: Jason Arday — Great and Unfortunate Things
A deep dive on Jason Arday — the Clapham council-estate boy diagnosed autistic at three who was told he would never speak, write, or live independently, yet spoke his first word at eleven, learned to read at eighteen, and became the youngest Black professor in Cambridge's history at thirty-seven; the marathon-running sociologist of race and education whose memoir was published days before he resigned his chair and was found dead at forty-one; his defining reflections on democratising higher education, difference, public scrutiny, and the cost of a life lived in the glare of other people's belief; and the deeply contested legacy of a man whose life story became the very argument he had spent his career trying to settle.