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Fatherhood has undergone an extraordinary and messy revolution, the effects of which we are still trying to absorb. So says Richard Collier, law professor, father of one and expert in the changing role of dads. Sabine Durrantmeets him

RICHARD COLLIER, professor of law at Newcastle University, in the northeast of England, lives in a quiet part of town in a house full of the normal detritus of family life – books and papers and photographs, a cat asleep on a bed, a rocking horse on the landing, a bowl of wrinkled fruit on the scrubbed pine table.