;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.

Great trespass along the River Dart today to kick off @righttoroam.bsky.social's 9 river trespasses in November - protesting the inadequacy & unworkability of the Govt's 9 river walks pledge We trespassed in an estate owned in the Cayman Islands & later met up with kayakers from Friends of the Dart

Published today: 'Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940', by Gareth Roddy bit.ly/4nwj9Y2 Gareth's book is the latest title in the Society's New Historical Perspectives series @uolpress.bsky.social. Available Open Access and in paperback print #Skystorians 1/2

We need a critique of AI in academic publishing. Following my decision not to sign an AI addendum to my contract with Cambridge University Press, I wrote this short essay which is now out in the Dublin Review of Books. 👇 drb.ie/move-over-fo...

Great to see @kbruisch.bsky.social’s superb essay on AI and Academic publishing and its extractive dimensions up on the DRB. @historytcd.bsky.social drb.ie/move-over-fo...

This is great news - delighted that Sunil will be our visiting Wiles Lecturer in History at QUB next May. The book is outstanding.

It's here! Get your copy at reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/contest...

I have taken the difficult decision this morning to rain on @plaidcymru.bsky.social's parade. "Plaid Cymru's Nature Blind Spot" nation.cymru/opinion/the-...

A major intervention on a highly sensitive issue, the politics of rape in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

This is interesting: the idea of the "post-industrial" or "deindustrialised" region is really pervasive, when in fact there's a lot of historical specificity that's missed out. The trajectory and technology of mining, diversification of industry, local/national tensions eg motor industry...

@marcmulholland.bsky.social is providing virtuoso threads on Irish history atm. Check out his feed.

Wonderful piece by Roy Foster on writing his landmark text Modern Ireland in the 1980s. link.springer.com/article/10.1... Might have been subtitled ‘The Strange Death of a Redmondite’.

Crass. The basic lack of dignity he‘s already bringing to the role.

Published 75 years ago today. These early 80s covers remain so evocative for me. The shaggy hair (Aslan’s too), the knitwear, and the gorgeous burnished colouring. I can see now the children represent a middle-class, mildly boho ideal. Who doesn’t want Peter’s jumper?

There is no need for a moral panic about the UK's welfare system. Far from perfect but recent discourse is nuts Spending is controlled, not spiralling Worklessness is near record lows My column www.ft.com/content/ee67...

Hello all! You can get 25% off the already surprisingly reasonable price of WE HAVE COME TO BE DESTROYED if you pre-order at @waterstones.bsky.social between 14th and 17th October using the discount code OCTOBER25! Pls share. Link here: www.waterstones.com/book/we-have... #skystorians #histchild 🗃

Great piece from @marthagill.bsky.social on the state of Britain’s National Parks. Shocked highest levels of sewage discharge are on Dartmoor. Good account of historical reasons park authorities have such limited powers to manage greatest threats to park ecologies. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Read 1000s of pages of this guy & still can’t decide if he‘s any good. The thought essays are sophmoronic, & the supernatural aspects in this one tedious, but the quotidian banalities & anti-style style do compel, though Claire Lowdon’s take in the TLS hits a target. Is this reading as scrolling?

Subsequent editions. I prefer the second, though lived with the Jack Yeats original for years.

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today. Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

It's also not "just another" extinction, it's the first from mainland Europe in centuries. CENTURIES. And there will be others within our lifetime. That's biodiversity loss. We'll never hear this sound, ever again xeno-canto.org/398794

I'm also incredibly excited (and feel quite humbled) about this prize! Thanks so much Dominique for sharing. For those who are interested, P&P's very kind editors have made the article open access for the next three months: academic.oup.com/past/article...

A fresh look at development. What happened on the ground? How did local people interact with and exercise influence over development agencies?

Rethinking labour politics, political violence, and brutalisation thesis!

A big, bold #envhist article on the seismic impacts of big infrastructure. You’ll feel the earth move as you read.

Please do take a look, and let me know what you think! A privilege to have the time and space to consider how displaced people exercise agency – and how to find them – in the records we do have.

This is from the Addison Report on National Parks (1931). He was not wrong.

This is a very clear account of how government policy has already reduced access to degrees in History & other SHAPE subjects for members of marginalised communities and how new moves risk making matters worse still.

📖 Forthcoming this month, a new book from our colleague, Dr Gareth Roddy (@grod.bsky.social), "Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880-1940." Pre-order your copy now from @uolpress.bsky.social! uolpress.co.uk/book/atlanti...

Starmer is a puzzle but here’s a take. Someone of immense abilities but a useless politician, not flawed-they all are-but useless. His talents, his legal mind, are just not of use. He doesn’t have the language, the discourse, the ideas, to lead a renewal of social democracy. A fundamental lack.