Just having this thought again as I listen to two hours of @gidcoe.bsky.social on a Thursday night after work and feel how far Spotify is from ever being able to provide such a satisfyingly wide-ranging soundtrack to the washing up

I got nothing but a rye smile

I am hearing that @uniofnottingham.bsky.social is suspending (i.e shutting down) *all modern language courses* in 2026-27. One of the largest departments in the UK. A shocking short sighted move that damages regional and national prospects @britishacademy.bsky.social @hetanshah.bsky.social

This week's Substack: an excerpt from Francesca Brooks' article 'A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail in the footsteps of Lynette Roberts', published in our recent PN Review 285, September - October 2025. Read here: open.substack.com/pub/pnreview... Subscribe to PNR: www.pnreview.co.uk/subscribe

Locked firmly by a heavy bar — this wooden door under the winter moon. -Kikaku (after Nobuyuki Yuasa)

The haters said they couldn't do it. And they were right. Honestly, great call from the haters.

✒️ This month's issue of @litreview.bsky.social stars the late Seamus Heaney! @jntod.bsky.social dissects the new Faber collection - The Poems of Seamus Heaney 👀 Browse the Literary Review archive on Exact Editions.

Nice to make the cover of the latest Literary Review for my piece on the enormous new Poems of Seamus Heaney. It's free to read here: literaryreview.co.uk/the-pen-the-...

They literally ruin everything they touch

Around this time yesterday I stopped at St. Katharine’s Chapel in Limehouse to check out their 14th century misericords. Thankfully it was otherwise empty of visitors, I had to lie flat on my back and shimmy underneath a big chair to photograph the hidden demon and its brides in the fourth image...

Painting created c.1949 in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital, by an individual who was compelled to live there, currently identified to us only as Drew. This is their only surviving work & no biographical information is currently known to us

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

A Thomas Hardy poem for Halloween

'No worries if not!'

They revoked Wole Soyinka’s US visa? I keep typing reactions and deleting them. Another new low.

One of the most psychotic both-sides headlines I've ever seen

Well, that’s just as well, given that so does the US Constitution

close! it's actually taken from the song State of Flux by the funk rock band I was in aged 17, which included the lyric "the old people live down Cemetery Road". a reference to Larkin by an unusually erudite 17-year-old? no, a reference to Cemetery Road, a road in my town where some old people lived

Tell me again how studying literature to understand its complexity isn't a real degree

So the new Apple TV thriller takes it title from... Philip Larkin's 'Toads'?

‘Here we come… walking down the street…’

Anyway, what the Government have done here on universities is put out a thinkpiece that's like a paper bag with 'policies' written on it - but with very little inside. All they've really done is press the button marked 'higher fees' without any sense of structural reform. (19/?)

Waking up, again, to the sound of two white men on the radio arguing about whether it is ok to be made "mad" by the very sight of black and Asian people on TV. 😒

It is hard to overstate the stress produced by the incoherence of academic institutions pumping generative AI when they want to play business and then leaving instructors to deal with the results when they want to play school

Life’s getting a bit more crap here if you are a person from an ethnic minority 🧵

The bitterly ironic transformation of the iconography of the poppy, from sombre reminder of the senseless futility of a war in which the British ruling class systematically ordered the wholesale slaughter of millions of working-class men, to 'War Christmas', says everything about the current crisis

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Trump Says He Won’t Rule Out Third Reich

The most expensive office chair John Lewis sells is £2,149 but, sure, let's pretend we don't understand money

Congratulations to Vidyan Ravinthiran, who has jointly won (with Karen Solie) the Forward Prize for Best Collection with Avidyā (Bloodaxe). Its brilliant final poem, "as a child", describes how an early speech impediment led him to be "a scrutineer of sound" with a love of "the avid void of English"

Not gonna lie, I think 30 years may well be the ideal amount of time to work at a collection of poems. I first met Graeme about 5 years after he got cracking, so I've seen this book grow poem by poem, and it's a banger.

I'm thrilled to say that my collection "Dirt Rich" will be published by Carcanet in January. I've been working at it for almost 30 years: love poems, elegies, lamentations, jokes... The aim is "all killer no filler". Please buy it if you can. Here's Andrew Latimer's brilliant cover:

Congratulations to Vidyan Ravinthiran, who has jointly won (with Karen Solie) the Forward Prize for Best Collection with Avidyā (Bloodaxe). Its brilliant final poem, "as a child", describes how an early speech impediment led him to be "a scrutineer of sound" with a love of "the avid void of English"

I used to have an office between two colleagues called Karen. I only realised when I moved out that I could have been saying 'Karen to right of me / Karen to left of me' the whole time. Just one of the many afterlives of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade': someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/someone-ha...

I used to have an office between two colleagues called Karen. I only realised when I moved out that I could have been saying 'Karen to right of me / Karen to left of me' the whole time. Just one of the many afterlives of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade': someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/someone-ha...

Ladybird book in the spotlight ‘The Night Sky’ (1965) Artist: Robert Ayton

lol.

ROY BATTY: …I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... they'll be gone. CHATGPT: That’s a powerful story 🎯 Thank you for sharing with me! It really spoke to your passion for space! 🚀

Everybody’s highfalutin’, nobody’s ever lowfalutin’

Dreamt I was pretending to be Lionel Ritchie in a Microsoft Teams chat as a 'prank'

I'm reminded of the Viz character, Rodger the Lodger, whose catchphrase when he had secured a room was: 'Great lodge, eh readers?'

excited to see an extract of my book up on Lit Hub - on Black labor unions, racialised service work, and the blues poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown @columbiaup.bsky.social @philipleventhal.bsky.social

i see you're doing something online that you have effortlessly done 100,000 times. would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? w

As a bellringer and poet I endorse this wholeheartedly

For your Sunday morning, I wrote about the English tradition of putting poetry into the mouths of bells someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/lines-writ...

not only does Gary Larson still have the juice, it seems to have only gotten stronger

‘Oo remembers football hooliganism? What were that all about?

Someone in this pub is singing ‘Whoaoh, we’re halfway there’ and he’s a quarter of the way there at best