I do love a bit of irony of a morning.

“I am no longer an artist, interested & curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, & may it burn their lousy souls” Paul Nash - 1/2:

'A generation unkind to their parents, and their children, pure in their own eyes, cruel hearted, whose teeth were as knives to shred the poor of the earth, shred them small. Where a general corruption that way, no good to be hoped for; the country will not last long.' (Lancelot Andrewes, 1617)

Cripes (full thread).

Outlook has moved the delete icon from the solemn, easy-access splendour it deserved at the far right of a message into a crowded cluster on the left and it's doing my head in.

I’m determined that my 1990 grad school FQ sees me through to retirement.

Tho't I'd check where Donne's sermons were in the new humanities library. Gratified that they were all checked out, but shelved under history of religion, separated by a whole floor from all of his other presumably more 'literary' works. FFS. Talk about a judgment on one's life's work. #earlymodern

If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day. (Donne, ‘The Autumnal’)

Oh so hate clicks are actually what they’re after

Time to close the curtains and turn the lights off in the front rooms. #halloween

www.theguardian.com/politics/202... He kept a WHAT?!

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o... The cognitive dissonance in this headline!

Just watched a very depressing Northwest Tonight full of vox pops - 'I'm not racist but I don't want Muslims (or that sort) round here' and you start to wonder if these people don't actually understand what racism means.

What lines.

If you care about, or have questions about, integrity and inclusion in the church, watch and listen to this. youtu.be/LLM_J8YH8Fk?...

🔥

Morning.

Oh look. Another Schwarzman Centre.

how far we've come from George Herbert in 1633 describing new Rome and old Rome as "Sinne's nipples"

Can't make this up: "'Trumpery' became a fashionable word" in 1840s England to describe the overuse of cheap decorative elements on houses. (Muthesius, Stefan. The English Terraced House. Yale U Pres, 1982. p242.)

A letter from the age of truth. Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley. We need more of this in our public discourse. Call vile ideologies and the people who peddle them out for who and what they are.

OMG.

Top live coverage by proper local journalists covering a county council meeting.

Is it too much to hope that this kind of utter trash is a sign of desperation in the face of a public that doesn't want AI? (rhetorical question)

Thank you. 😱

Middle-class crisis: kill batch of sourdough by turning oven on to ‘take the chill off’ for proving and forget to turn it off.

Couldn’t agree more. Same for literary texts. 👇

Hurrah to this! 👇👇👇

Little pleasures—for tailor’s chalk I use a piece of chalk I picked up at one of my favourite places.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... This is a little gem—even if you don’t remember or know (alas!) the Smothers Brothers. How things have changed in 60 yrs.

My goodness, John Donne would have loved this. #earlymodern

Truth here. Same for any software too I think. Indexing is a vital stage of presenting my own work that guard jealously; it’s too interpretative to leave to a program or an LLM.

By some fluke of scheduling I ended up with the inaugural lecture in the Faculty’s new home this morning. (People did attend, but I was there paranoid-early of course.)

Essay topic potential here.

A touch of May in October.

Celebrating 50 years since the conversion of one of Oxford's most iconic buildings into one of its most beautiful libraries @lincoln.ox.ac.uk (Yours truly also in the slideshow getting very excited showing things from the historic collection.) lincoln.ox.ac.uk/news/lincoln...

Odd to stumble on one's name in catalogue metadata. This was a copy of Andrewes' XCVI Sermons that I used almost every day during my JRF (post-doc)—I didn't damage it (!), but it seemed an obvious way to say thank you.

The best thing about Oxford’s new Radcliffe Quarter development is the vista to the old OUP gate.

The fact that the UK govt blocks a report on the impact of rainforest collapse in south America says so much: 1. They know climate change and the impacts are real and will be deadly 2. Instead of planning for solutions, their response is to: - suppress the information - block refugees 😡

It’s clean-out-the-greenhouse night. (Not the burrata, obviously),

No sudden rupture is now required for the far right to take power in this country. For what we're seeing is a steady normalisation of extremists by the Conservative and Labour Parties, BBC, Telegraph, Mail and others. A shift once considered unthinkable beings to look acceptable, even inevitable.🧵

Good point. 👇

We need to get over the fact that no one takes VHS cassettes on free cycle days.

Hadn’t realised *quite* how many quinces were on our little tree. Jelly and membrillo day it seems.

🫡

Well that almost broke me (stiff canvas, lining, zipper), but I now have a new bag ready for term to start. (Pattern and fabric from Merchant & Mills, Rye.) Oh, and those lectures I wanted to revise . . .

The importance of ceremonies like these is not merely in honoring those who fought for what was right when so many were wrong. It’s also to remind us, in this age, that determined people doing the right thing is never easy — and always worth it.

From Berwick, Robert Gascoigne, a royal messenger, writes to Walsingham complaining of incompetence in the postal system the north-east; apparently letters took 17 hours to get from 30 miles from Berwick to Alnwick. The excuse was that the postman's boy fell in the water. 4/

Very excited to be running this conference with Paul Norris. Delighted to have @mcculloughp.bsky.social as our keynote speaker. We can't wait to hear your ideas! Please share widely

What could possibly go wrong with putting Mr ‘I haven’t had to solve a real problem since 2007 and now I believe AI will solve everything’ in charge of a neo-colonial project he was unable to succeed in as a much younger man.