He wasn't dead, just away working in Blackburn 🤷🏻‍♀️

I'm a family portrait photographer. In my job you become a good judge of character. I'm convinced that at a number of the kids I've photographed will grow up to be high profile murderers. I'm keeping the pics to sell to the newspapers when they are convicted.

will Farage deport his girlfriend

Was reading earlier about a fairly interesting albeit silly wrestling death from 1894. Well, a post-wrestling death. Two young men wrestled on a stone floor, both fell. No problem. One got up, slipped on a book that had been thrown on the floor, whacked his head against a door. Died 30 mins later.

Monday morning! Top work inbox spam 😀

Far-right Americans all talk like they're cutting a wrestling promo, but are also shit at cutting promos.

Denny Harrington (1849-1911) was a thief, a thug, a drunk, a dock labourer and a very well known pugilist, who was arrested, by my count, at least 35 times 👊🏻🍺 Come for the getting pissed and jumping on sailors, stay for throwing a bowl onto a cop's head: grapplingwithhistory.com/2025/04/15/t...

As the biographer of a mysterious foreign sailor, in Whitechapel in the 1880s, who mysteriously disappeared and was heard of no more... 🧐😂

Good on the Gazette! 😂

Colchester flagwanker protest was v. funny today. Cops penned 50 people in next to a club, Turkish barbers, Indian cafe, employees just ignored them, kept serving delicious food & fades. Old boy busker on sax for hours nearby drowned them out. Blue haired goth kids v. chill, had great DIY t-shirts.

1897. Sam Baxter, well-known lightweight 1880s East End boxer (who once performed at Sebright Music Hall with Hezekiah Moscow), was perilously sick with TB. The description of the disease, and of him, was sort of beautifully written by the Sporting Life? Sam did not die until 1916! (From TB.)

There’s something of the sixth form common room about a lot of podcasts, isn’t there?

Not at all nice to the people on the receiving end of a large fish, but see if you can find the paragraph which had way too much information

According to Prime Video's auto-generated subtitles, Leo the MGM lion's roar translates to "Love it."

🧪 How many times and in what different ways do we need confirmation that genAI is crap for anything except the simplest tasks? *Because it doesn't read, or comprehend, or think*. (also, hilariously, it's the same AI Oxford Uni has just paid some huge sum to licence for all staff & students)

What is cool, something I like a lot, is being a woman writing a boxing book (almost entirely man-boxing) with an editor who is also a woman! Glad that worked out. There's loads of other stuff in it except boxing (eg murder, bears) so it's not really a boxing book, although it is sort of, kind of.

"Hey, want your writing to sound as bland as everything else generated with AI?"

Every CMS and newsletter/press release sending platform has recently added an AI writing/rewriting tool. Then the sales people try to flog it to people like me, who WRITE NEWSLETTERS AND PRESS RELEASES FOR A LIVING. They seem confused as to why I stop them mid sentence and say nah, not interested 🤷🏻‍♀️

Just remembered the 1891 Sebright Music Hall Murder Bear. Okay, fine, Second-Degree Manslaughter Bear. He wasn't going to be in the book, but might end up in it. If this book has any conclusion or theme it's don't mess with large captive animals? 🐻🦵🏻 grapplingwithhistory.com/2021/06/11/w...

Me: Spends 15yrs in the day job getting paid to summarise and pitch other researchers' work in a concise and clear manner, in order to make it sound interesting and accessible. Also me:

What is cool, something I like a lot, is being a woman writing a boxing book (almost entirely man-boxing) with an editor who is also a woman! Glad that worked out. There's loads of other stuff in it except boxing (eg murder, bears) so it's not really a boxing book, although it is sort of, kind of.

Denny Harrington (1849-1911) was a thief, a thug, a drunk, a dock labourer and a very well known pugilist, who was arrested, by my count, at least 35 times 👊🏻🍺 Come for the getting pissed and jumping on sailors, stay for throwing a bowl onto a cop's head: grapplingwithhistory.com/2025/04/15/t...

October 1889 - news on prize fighting in South Africa was published in the UK's Sporting Life. Among reports was this one - '110 ROUNDS FOR LOVE' - in which a 99lb man fought a 108lb man for two and a half hours over a 'lovely woman'. HOPE SHE WAS WORTH IT. (Echardt won. No news on the lady.)

I hope you approve of the new Bishop.

Too Poor to Die with Amy Shea Please join us for a talk with Amy Shea – to mark the launch of her new book Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins. Hosted online by Dr John Troyer on Tuesday 23 September from 7-8pm BST Tickets below. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/too-poor-t...

Cover reveal for my forthcoming book, WE HAVE COME TO BE DESTROYED: GROWING UP IN COLD WAR BRITAIN which tells the history of Cold War Britain (c.1956-89) through the eyes of children & young people! Out with @yalebooks.bsky.social 28 April 2026 #booksky #skystorians yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster... On the bus to my parents' place this morning my child tried to pickpocket a water bottle from the school blazer of a teenage girl 🥹🤷🏻‍♀️ Is this how it starts?

I do not have cause to hear 13yr old boys converse often, but the ones on my bus right now are discussing air fryers, particularly bacon cooking tactics and whose mum's chicken is better. It is entirely lovely.

My child has dozens of his own books and hundreds of mine within easy reach, yet every single day without fail he throws a copy of the Goodfellas screenplay and a copy of Peter Hennessy's Establishment & Meritocracy onto the kitchen floor 🤷🏻‍♀️

October 1889 - news on prize fighting in South Africa was published in the UK's Sporting Life. Among reports was this one - '110 ROUNDS FOR LOVE' - in which a 99lb man fought a 108lb man for two and a half hours over a 'lovely woman'. HOPE SHE WAS WORTH IT. (Echardt won. No news on the lady.)

Poverty porn still alive and well in 2025. Fuck the Guardian and fuck Rowan McCabe

Less than a month until Archives Live: Whitechapel (Oct 13) - so excited to be one of three expert guests sharing short research films & answering questions from GCSE students across the country. LOOK at this awesome artwork National Archives made for it. My guy Alec Munroe in the middle!

The launch of my new @manchesterup.bsky.social book Songs of Seven Dials will be at 6pm, Tues 21 Oct, at Waterstones Covent Garden. I'll be in conversation with the wonderful @julialaite.bsky.social. Please do come along. Free tickets, but register in advance www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/songs-of-s...

The THINGS I would do The life I would lead 🥹😍

I wrote an SOP once and typed “click floppy dick icon to save” and did not realize it until after I sent it.

A Thousand Blows fans will notice the pub - the notorious Blue Coat Boy, Wapping home of bareknuckle boxing and Stephen Graham being a tiny but very wide MENACE! In reality, on Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Sugar Goodson did manage boxing nights though! Punch Lewis kept bulldogs chained to the bar 🐶🥊

Less than a month until Archives Live: Whitechapel (Oct 13) - so excited to be one of three expert guests sharing short research films & answering questions from GCSE students across the country. LOOK at this awesome artwork National Archives made for it. My guy Alec Munroe in the middle!

Still thinking about the text today from my mother, who - fully aware I have a full time job, a second job, some part-time jobs, and a toddler - just wanted to gently mention that while feeding my cats as I worked away from home this week, she noticed my mini-oven is filthy and I should clean it 👍🏻

To echo what @alanallport.bsky.social has said: if you’re an historian (particularly of the military, world war variety) and you’re still using Twitter, you are - however passively you’d like to argue - standing on the wrong side of history by supporting Elon Musk.

I think about this poem by Ian Duhig — about Jo Cox, the Labour MP assassinated by a man shouting ‘Britain first’ — every day at the moment. No other contemporary poet has looked so clearly at the political reality of the far right as a minority who must always be appeased

Morning! If you're not starting the week dressed as well as this baby travelling with Lord George Sanger’s Circus circa 1890 then you're not trying hard enough.

Anyone still on X needs to have a word, probably several, with themselves. Really strong ones eg. what the fuck.

Delighted to be giving an #IrishLondonHistory ☘️ talk on Wed 22 October for the St Giles Society at the Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London WC2. Come & hear how the Irish presence in St Giles was so much more complex than the infamous Rookery! Tix only £5 👉 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-irish-...

13 Sept 1885 - Alexander Hayes Munroe (the man portrayed by Francis Lovehall in #AThousandBlows), a Jamaican mariner turned boxer, was buried in Manor Park, Ilford. Alec was murdered, aged 36. Some 20,000 people lined the streets of East London to pay respects. More to come next year in my book 🥊

GOD. Don't remember the last time I had a sort of visceral chest-tightening, throat gone all lumpy, eyes about to pour, reaction to something. The beauty and joy of this. Perfect in every way. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

War, fire, alcoholism, brain damage, asylums, child death and begging for charity, mostly. But also a cameo from George Hackenschmidt 👍🏻

The final chapter of my book deals with the post-prime decades of my 1880s boxers' lives (for those that weren't murdered or killed by TB in their 30s, anyway). The tragic decline in brain and body of middle aged men who had got to be 'someone', for a while. It's full of absolute misery.

Liverpool is BRILLIANT. A first visit, and hopefully not the last! My after-day-job-research may take me back here for book II, with any luck 🥊🙏🏻 Working at the British Science Festival #BSF25 has been an experience. My first, and our 194th. Weird and wonderful. See you next year in Southampton!

None of these men are my man. But these are some other men. Never a bad time for compact 1902 boxing lads! The moustachioed and exotically short shorted Billy, Billy, and Ed 🥊