@britishmuseum.bsky.social £42k. How can such a low salary be justified? You‘ll need a highly qualified person for an exceptionally high profile project that will bring 100,000s visitors to the BM. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQZ701/p...

But for the fact the main protagonists have sex, I don’t understand how this is adult fiction. Evocation of wartime London quite enjoyable but the plot reminds me of the sort of adventure story I read when 9 or 10. Why is so much contemporary adult fiction so infantilising?

The latest oil shock has led to a resurgence of North Sea petro nationalism. I’ve written for @the-breakdown.bsky.social on the illusion of plenty behind Reform, Tory and SNP claims that red-green wreckers are sabotaging our energy security by blocking drilling. www.break-down.org/north-sea-na...

My feature from last year on “swaling” on Dartmoor - in summary it does at lot more harm than good! (And please don’t go on about “fuel load” without reading the article or at least having a basic understanding of the ecology of moorland vegetation) www.dartmoornature.org.uk/post/swaling

Next week: the latest in the Society's 'New Historical Perspectives' book series is 'Organised Militarism in Interwar Britain. The Navy League and the Air League of the British Empire', by Rowan Thompson: bit.ly/474AbHq Published free OA & in p/back @uolpress.bsky.social on 9 April #Skystorians 1/2

On advance access: "Making sugar out of opium: A narco-plantation regime in early modern Southeast Asia" by Guanmian Xu (Peking University) and Shohei Okubo (Ryukoku University) doi.org/10.1093/past...

This is a pint of Tennent’s, possibly my first.

I’m going to a proper gig. There are excited young people.

This is probably the most serious site-based environmental problem in the UK today, but I’m not sure British environmentalists are that exercised about it. Choosing my geographical signifiers deliberately here… www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Waterlogged Oxfordshire.

Oxford buses have a reading light.

Not what we saw on the Beeb!

As laughs go, this ranks pretty high!

Our latest Newsletter, coinciding with the publication of Past & Present No. 270 (February 2026) went out to subscribers this morning If you are not currently signed up to he mailing list check it out, subscribe, and share with your networks: pastpresentsoc.substack.com/p/past-and-p...

@gabyhinsliff.bsky.social Agree with your argument, of course, but not sure about the claim universities have cut back on teaching. If anything, direction of travel opposite, & increasing under pressure from OfS.

I want to go on X so I can shout at @BBCSport But I won’t

Dear BBC, Team GB golds are great but all this waffle when live competition continues is really frustrating. Yours etc.

Indicative of a) how communities can come to rely on universities as provisioning community services b) how a prestige project can become a liability c) how positive heritage narratives don’t pay the bills d) abt what constitutes legit use of student fee income www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Joan Wallach Scott piece, historian friends

Full of entertaining excesses, thoroughly enjoyable essay about an author the literary heroes of my youth told me I should read, but I never really did. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

What is the BBC doing?!

Utter disgrace that 2012-2022 student cohort being shafted in this way. Other cohorts pay RPI on the loan (bad enough), they pay +3%. To think that all of us who work in the sector had a substantial proportion of our salaries financed through this system is deeply troubling.

Sitting by the window, arm and leg against the side of the train, can feel the flex in the structure of carriage as forces load and unload at 300 kmh. An expectedly physical experience.

Please share: Fully-funded PhD opportunity at @livunigeog.bsky.social, supervised by my wonderful colleagues Dr Heather Sangster and Prof. Briony McDonagh and moi: 'From Empire to Ecology: Environmental, Colonial and Industrial Legacies of the Manchester Ship Canal' www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Not all drystone walls are created equal.

Long wondered about the significance of the oak woods at Manaton Rocks. How much of Dartmoor was once like this?

When your Polish mother-in-law takes charge of Wigilia (Xmas eve meal), nothing left to chance. I’m sure she’ll be impressed by today’s M&S Xmas lunch… Alt text…?

;Eliminating funding for 3* research in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) would benefit Russell Group institutions by about £50 million a year, suggests modelling into how potential changes to funding formulas may play out.' 1/3

Northumberland beaches massively overrated. Cold and bleak.

Blair was deeply unpopular in the Labour Party after Iraq but it was hard to imagine who would be better at the job. Starmer’s acute vulnerability reflects the basic fact that enough MPs and party members now think there are several people who would be better at the job than him.

Learning about a band through a Guardian end of year round up isn’t very hip, but it’s got me to Geese. The sound is New York in obvious ways, but they’re messing very nicely with those influences. Plus, they’re a bunch of mates from school playing instruments together. Proper.

Ongoing decimation of British universities part 252: Apx. 1000 academic staff at University of Essex just received formal ‘risk of redundancy’ letters via email. Please share @ucuessex.bsky.social @ucu.org.uk

www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Great historiographical piece by Lindsey Earner-Bynre, Roisin Higgins & Carole Holohan. Subtle on revisionism, really helpful discussion of method, and powerful on the intersection between work on respectability, the experiential turn, & the unofficial archive.

Please do chip into the National Trust’s crowdfunder to help manage the land around the Cerne Giant for chalk wildflowers and butterfly species like Duke of Burgundy here: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/support-us/a...

Pioneering dissection of how environmental politics can play out in post-conflict societies, in this case Northern Ireland and the Lough Neagh crisis in the context of competing ‘ethno-nationalist … segmented’ electoral blocks. @marcmulholland.bsky.social.

RIP Mani youtu.be/4PBU_N5x4ls?...

Coming soon!

Easy to overdo the historical comparison, but pope as a national figure & counterweight to political regime recalls JP II and Poland under communism.

"I thought of how, as a child, I’d used pylons to calculate distance & time, and how they seemed to anchor space. I thought of how the turbines resisted this, how unmeasurable they seemed, in a nightscape with few visual referents." 'Landscapes of Power' longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/landscapes...

Inside the Roman Catholic chapel at Biddlestone in Northumberland is an intriguing remnant from life on the home front during the Second World War. 1/6

Thought Anna Funder’s Wifedom brilliant. Perhaps the most effective dissection of patriarchy I’ve read. Here’s some reasons why I liked it as a historian.

Thought Anna Funder’s Wifedom brilliant. Perhaps the most effective dissection of patriarchy I’ve read. Here’s some reasons why I liked it as a historian.

Breaking the tax pledge is the right call...and politically sulphurous. Reeves must argue, far more forcefully, that taxes are *the* essential downpayment we all pay for a fairer society. Patrick Diamond and I wrote for @renewaljournal.bsky.social. Key points in 🧵 👇 renewal.org.uk/blog/if-labo...

What's the German word for the joy one feels when a friend publishes a book?

Labour needs to stop fooling itself and lean in to the political logic of its choices. It is a high taxing, high spending government. www.ft.com/content/00a5...

Lost as Labour candidate in 92 to mate pretending to be a Liberal Democrat who promised to ban IT coursework. No amount of pontificating about the degradations of Thatcherism was going to beat that.

I'm sure if any serious attempt was made to do this there would be heads on spikes. It's quite hard to transition to a higher tax and lower consumption economic model, but the current one is clearly creating lots of problems we're no longer able to grow our way out of

Mad but fascinating. Prob reveals legislation partly drafted based on maps rather than on-site checks, meaning Bowood ‘Lane’ effectively misclassified, creating an obligation. Can leg be amended to avoid? Parody of a planning dispute, when local amenity society wins ‘modification’ to proposals.