Thomas Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, is obsessed with unambiguous facts and numbers. When I asked a press officer at HMRC for an estimate of how many “open cases” it plans to write off, ...

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.… ...

Thomas Gradgrind - from Hard Times - is one of Charles Dickens's coldest characters and is the twelth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters. Granada's critically acclaimed ...

Simon Jenkins’ attack on the test culture imposed on our schools by the government is right (A Gradgrind ethos destroys good schools, 26 October) – except that it destroys all schools. The pressure ...

Dickens’s 'Hard Times' feels newly urgent as a classic reply to hustle culture, exposing how facts, work and usefulness can crush imagination, tenderness and human worth today too easily now.

The late Peter Drucker claimed to have invented the term 'the knowledge economy' in the 1960s. Whereas industrial-age workers toiled with their hands and produced 'stuff', he posited, today's ...

Mr. Gradgrind is the alter ego of Paul Brians, professor of English at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, who sets out to provide specific, concrete answers to life's rhetorical ...