Parsing Farage’s démarche farce. A day earlier than usual, new post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog on what little Brexit news there is but mainly on Farage's 'resignation' and the deeper issues of defining democracy and of cryptocurrencies: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/07/pars...

RIP Tony Rayns He deeply enriched my love & appreciation of Asian cinema which I then passed on to my film students for decades. This fascinating 3 hour interview will do the same for you. Pt 1 youtu.be/p8PEzzKsatE?... Pt 2 youtu.be/6Fgu7M6NOOs?... Pt 3 youtu.be/YkI8p7wmvIE?...

Very sad to hear about the passing of Tony Rayns. He was invaluable to the appreciation and understanding of Asian cinema and a champion of many filmmakers, the world and home ent. industry are poorer for this passing. He will be greatly missed.

On the now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition, and its influence in the field of microhistory:

Reznikoff: the CBe July newsletter, as archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2026/07/news...

Ten years on from the referendum, Brexit didn’t settle Britain’s biggest argument, it made it louder. My essay for @theleaduk.bsky.social on how Brexit’s broken promises built the conditions for Farage’s comeback, and why nobody’s blaming Brexit for any of it open.substack.com/pub/theleadu...

Brexit ten years on: unsettled and unsettling. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog on the connections between Starmer’s resignation & the referendum anniversary, and why that anniversary isn’t a commemoration but an episode within the ongoing saga: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/06/brex...

'The mysterious achievement of Prynne’s later poetry is that its total impenetrability is identical with its strange generosity.' Lovely (and generous) tribute to JH Prynne's poetic strangeness here by Ben Phillips www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I’m not saying the debate in the U.K. has moved to the right, but Ed Miliband is basically seen as Pol Pot for aiming for a climate target first agreed to by…I think Theresa May’s government? Definitely Johnson’s. And this chat is going on during the middle of a record-breaking heatwave

Good morning. Here’s my latest for @atrupar.com fabulous Public Notice, this one about Trump’s unintentionally reflective cesspool of a renovation. Please read and, if you like it, share. Thx so much. open.substack.com/pub/aaronrup...

The story of social media’s problem with news, in two posts (these are from X)

"Few passages in literature depict the undefeated human spirit with such persuasive force." Brian Patrick Eha on a scene towards the end of Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt when the protagonist, beginning the day in the Regina Coeli prison, ends it in a Neapolitan bomb shelter.

A shirtless white man, in the street with a knife in his hand, having attacked and wounded five people, allegedly shouting anti-Muslim slogans is the sixth story on the BBC UK news page. There is absolutely no doubt at all this would be the lead story if attacker and intended victims were reversed.

For the Almanac, I wrote a short personal appreciation of the historian Carlo Ginzburg and his exploration of the subterranean depths of human experience: www.paradise-almanac.net/p/in-memoria...

Nearly a thousand pages long, Jay Leyda's The Melville Log may be the longest biography never written. Never written in that Leyda assembles an enormous set of evidence about Herman Melville's life and work—but leaves it to us, the reader, to create the narrative from it. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Ivan Rogers: “I find it quite depressing that we’re still here after 10 years and still going around the same loops with the same level of misunderstandings.” The infinite Brexit loop. The UK forever travelling on the edge of a Möbius strip, and of Europe. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

“The older I get, the more I distrust discourse”: An Interview with M. John Harrison — @monalisavitti.bsky.social minorliteratures.com/2026/06/18/t...

Carlo Ginzburg est mort, annonce la presse italienne. Immense historien, il a su construire une oeuvre originale entre micro-histoire et anthropologie historique qui a considérablement renouvelé la discipline. www.repubblica.it/cultura/2026...

Despair. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog about how politics is stuck whilst violence intensifies, how ‘the first lie wins’ in constructing political narratives, and how Brexit ruptured the 'cordon sanitaire'. Long and depressing read: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/06/desp...

How is this any better than Russia advertising building developments on the rubble of Mariupol? Keir Starmer Urged to Stop London Event ‘Promoting Land Grab’ in Occupied Palestine – Byline Times bylinetimes.com/2026/06/10/k...

Out today across the UK and Europe, KIERON SMITH, BOY by James Kelman ‘a magnificent and important novel’ Irvine Welsh Available from your local bookshop and @bookshop-org-uk.bsky.social www.andotherstories.org/kieron-smith...

Back from the printer and available for order here: www.twistedspoon.com/visions-appa...

Just noting that when Sarah Everard was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer and a vigil held for her on Clapham Common, Farage urged people not to attack men or the police.

"Terrorism" on the left. "Protest" on the right.

Fascinating lecture from Siedensticker on (mis)translating Kawabata and others. Found via the excellent @lonesomereader.bsky.social blog. swet.jp/articles/art...

In the post today, the hugely welcome reissue from @andotherstories.bsky.social of an extraordinary novel. I wrote about the first edition briefly here: this-space.blogspot.com/2024/04/39-b...

After years of finding US publishers uninterested in Dorothy Richardson's modernist masterpiece, Pilgrimage, I decided to reissue it myself. Here are some reflections on why I feel so passionate about Pilgrimage and becoming its first US publisher in 50 years. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Before that, in October, comes Ingeborg Bachman's Complete Stories (New Directions in the US) translated by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis. At 400 pages this will be a substantial addition to her work in English!

What on Earth?! This video is from Greenpeace. 💔

This is 14% of Lebanon's territory. Functionally indistinguishable from what Russia has done in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

“one has the sense that Clark is feeling her way into and through years of accumulated reading, contemplation and experience to loosen a stream of thoughtful reflection... Oh, how fortunate to be on the receiving end” Joseph Schreiber www.blackheraldpress.com/what-lies-ahead @roughghosts.bsky.social

So what happens when Reform take over your local council? This. #KentCountyCouncil

Best Books for Writers 📌 buff.ly/Yvmvoro 📚 buff.ly/7h8dYXr

New piece by me on the Labour leadership, the Makerfield by-election, and Brexit

New book: FINDING ALADDIN celebrates a Syrian storyteller who was almost lost to history. Hanna Diab created Aladdin from the facts of his own life, only to be betrayed by those he trusted—and then erased from his own story. I'm overturning 300 years of injustice. Order now: linktr.ee/matthewteller

Britain’s post-Brexit ungovernability. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog discussing last week’s elections, the Labour leadership crisis which has followed, and what both tell us about post-Brexit politics: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/05/brit...

I've long thought that one of the most insidious, enervating, unavoidable, continually stress-inducing aspects of the occupation—which is almost impossible to convey to outsiders not experiencing it at first hand—is sound. That x100 in Gaza. Ahmed Sbaih writes: massreview.org/2026/05/08/t...

Britain "at the heart of Europe", 2026 edition:

🔴 Rick Wilson's Warning From America: Nigel Farage Will Be Your Donald Trump, Unless You Act Now The former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project founder has some hard lessons for Conservatives and Labour alike

Retweeting, because we MUST keep bearing witness. '...the physical witness written on the bodies of these patients was that the ceasefire really has not meant the cessation of hostilities, of violence against the bodies of the people of Gaza. It’s ongoing.' #genocide💔

On Antoine Volodine's novel The Monroe Girls, an abject post-apocalyptic romantic comedy biblioklept.org/2026/05/07/o...

This website collects, summarises, analyses and visualises the starvation of Gaza in the last 30 months. Initiated by colleagues of mine from the Hebrew University. bearing-witness.com/starvation-s...

Edmund White was a dear friend and teacher whom I miss terribly nearly a year after his death. I've written a brief memoir about him here: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Wrote about Robert Coover's weird, mind-bending, vital 1968 novel about fantasy baseball, "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.," newly reprinted by NYRB Classics. for @thenation.com. www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Today I have written about the delights of J. H. Prynne, the grand old Cantabrigian late modernist who died recently. (And a bit about his close contemporary, Geoffrey Hill.)

Israel bombs Beirut again, in line with its standard definition of “ceasefire” in which it fires whenever it wants to while the other sides stops firing. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

Pierre Guyotat's Idiocy is different from his "language texts" ("by comparison, a breeze to read") but remains a "protest against the horrors of colonialism, capitalism and the violence we inflict on nature and those we deem Other." Reviewed in @stingingfly.bsky.social by John Christopher Vaughan.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Pettiness beyond all reason, while Farage and his ilk sail on through massive scandals.