Berwick Balfour is the pen name of a distinguished academic with comprehensive experience as a teacher, researcher and manager in a number of universities and also in industry. 'A Sense of Direction' is a hilarious description of the goings on in a fictional academic department of a Scottish university. The characters involved are described in graphic detail. The novel can also be read at a deeper level as posing the very real tensions between academic values and research and their relationship to real life problems. Are certain ideas deep or spurious?