enjoy my review of Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk @nationaltheatre.org.uk on this lovely early spring eve 🌼 open.substack.com/pub/mountain...

Maybe I'm biased but I can't help but think today's #ModWrite would be very well spent writing a proposal for the Collective Forms symposium - CFP deadline just one week away! www.chase.ac.uk/news-1/colle...

CFP ALERT! Join us at UEA for Collective Forms, 19 June - a symposium to explore the goals, ideals, and promises of collectives, from the religious to the political, as both the subject and condition of art. Deadline 23 March: www.chase.ac.uk/news-1/colle...

This is Amy Madigan and Ed Harris refusing to applaud Elia Kazan's honorary Oscar in 1999. During the Blacklist Era, Kazan named names. Good on Amy and Ed.

I wrote about derelict London and perpetual war in David Gladwell's MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981), an accurate and disturbing take on the Doris Lessing apocalypse classic. A must see for Julie Christie heads. open.substack.com/pub/mountain...

Dedicated to the one I hate: Frank McNally on how a book inscription came back to haunt Patrick Kavanagh

Seán Rocks was a lovely man and a great broadcaster. He brought arts programming to life. He'll be very missed.

Ah lads, Seán Rocks 💔

"If women ruled the world, there would be no wars. True or false? False, if all the women were Ursula von der Leyen. Because a hawk in sheep’s clothing is still a hawk." www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Had a lovely time talking Doris Lessing and distrusting the university at @ucddublin.bsky.social Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Literature conference last week. Lovely people, panels, and setting: more conferences within walking distance of the sea please 🙏

This is happening in two weeks 👀: trustlit.org/dis-trusting...

“Yippee ki-yay…” We are excited to tell everyone that Westminster Council decided on May 1st that the Prince Charles Cinema would be included in the list of Assets of Community Value maintained by the Council under section 87 of the Localism Act 2011.

Beautiful sunshine and scenes of solidarity on the first day of UEA UCU's next phase of industrial action. 🌞 #SaveUEA

delighted by this news! came across this absolute gem by chance in The Last Bookshop, Rathmines a few years ago and was totally bowled over, really one of the best memoirs around

huge love to my UEA colleagues out in the picket today! wish I could be with you, sending solidarity from Texas #SaveUEA

"And Foy has written books, though none are published. She thinks she needs a mentor to help with that. She shows me a hardback self-made copy of a book she wrote all about rhubarb." 🩷 what a gorgeous saturday read www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Thinking of Ann Lovett today, ##otd 1984, 15yrs old & pregnant, she went to the grotto in Granard where she gave birth to a still born baby boy, she was found sometime later but died shortly after of hypothermia & blood loss. Her story shocked the country #speirgorm www.thejournal.ie/readme/ann-l...

I have started the inevitable substack to log my time living in the USA. Please read along, like, subscribe, etc. First up, feeling like an alien in New Orleans... open.substack.com/pub/mountain...

an English colleague and I were ranting to each other yesterday in the corridor about devastating situation at Cardiff University, when an American colleague came up, asked us what was going on, and replied "Ha, our president is still worse!" 🤷‍♀️

UEA is trying to fire hundreds of my colleagues and insist that they "don't think that students and staff will notice... these are modest changes to our overall budget." I'm fighting with and for my colleagues at @uea-ucu.bsky.social to save those jobs and build a better future for HE

wearing cowboy boots to the archive today

If you're hanging around #MLA25 I will be presenting Saturday 3.30pm on identity under colonial confinement in Doris Lessing’s archive - would love to see some friendly faces! In exchange I promise some saucy excerpts from Lessing's letters...

First book / Last book of 2024

I love how much Alec Guinness loved Wallace & Gromit

a lone pint in Slattery's pub, Rathmines

lovely day at #NWiMS yesterday chatting Lessing, Woolf and archives, spent today rushing to finish my #MLA paper, and now am very very very happy to be scheduling my out of office

I'm in great company writing about the Hallmark Christmas industrial complex for Cinema Year Zero's latest issue - out now and free to read! 🎄 cinemayearzero.com/2024/12/12/t...

‘Wintry Morning’, London Bridge North (2004) by Ed Gray edgrayart.com

taught a nature writing seminar today and campus got the memo

😕 Here we go again. timeshighereducation.com/news/deeply-... 📢 Follow us for updates about the ongoing situation at UEA. #SaveUEA #UCU 🦋 Please share this post with followers, to let them we're now also on Bluesky. 💪 UEA UCU Branch Meeting this morning at 10am. Check your inboxes for full details.

This is insane. I know every uni says this, and they’d likely be right, but (aside from stellar international rep) UEA really is so important for the region. Many really great people are going to get shafted here.

I have made a starter pack for researchers working on modernist and avant-garde women. Absolutely not comprehensive, just put some names down to get the list started - please let me know if you want to be removed/added! go.bsky.app/VSS1aBR

this #ModWrite I'm using my 2 hour commute to try and answer a question Doris Lessing once put to her husband: "Do you think Lenin would have liked Virginia Woolf?" Gottfried didn't give her the answer she wanted, but maybe my #NWiMS paper will...

THE CONVERSATION (dir. Coppola, 1974)

read my latest for Critical Quarterly: 'The Clinch', a reappraisal of Martin Amis's London Fields onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....