Richard Collins: Would you have picked pigs as the most picky eaters?

Pigs are not strict vegetarians — eating both plant and animal material, they can afford to turn their noses up when more tempting morsels are available

An experiment has confirmed that pigs are the most pernickety diners; they ate only 32% of the plant species offered. Horses were also quite choosy eaters. They dined on 59% of the 204 species presented to them. Cows ate 66%, and sheep 82%. Goats were the most profligate, eating 84% of offerings

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there — L P Hartley

The ‘supervisor’ keeps a PhD candidate on the straight and narrow. A thesis, however, must be entirely the student’s own. That wasn’t always the case. In 18th-century Sweden, for example, the text was written, or dictated, by the supervisor. The candidate’s job was merely to defend the results publicly.