New York City - 1978 📷 by Joel Meyerowitz

The phrase ‘learning is invisible’ is a lazy and sloppy cliche which we should probably stop using. open.substack.com/pub/bernarda...

Coverage is not progress. Students struggle for 3 curricular reasons: lack of specificity, lack of systematicity, and lack of subject sensitivity. open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

A Zola Top 10 Having read half of Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, what is considered to be the better half, as well as his break out success ‘Thérèse Raquin’ of 1867, I am now in a position to construct a Top 10. What are the best Zola novels? Where should one start? Nana The…

The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1873) Zoa, the quintessential novelist of modernity, set out to write about the period of tumultuous change through which he had lived during the Second Empire in France – 1851-1870. Capitalism suddenly was this great engine of change, it was ripping everything up…

Whenever I go church crawling, I obsessively look for graffiti. Recently, in All Saints Church, Claverley, I hit the jackpot when I found this fantastic little guy ✨️ #history #churchcrawling #churches #historicgraffiti #churchesoftheworld

It's still common for people to assume that more activities needing a "human touch" - care, "hand holding" - is not vulnerable to AI. So teachers, doctors, care workers have some moat. It's plausible, but certainly not guaranteed.

Alice Augusta Ball found the cure for leprosy at 23. She died in a mysterious lab accident at 24. Arthur Dean stole her research, stole it and renamed it from "The Ball Method" to "The Dean Method." It took 90 years before her original research papers were found and she got the credit due to her.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932 Often compared to 1984 by George Orwell, these two dystopian classics are judged on how well they predict the future. Inevitably each one gets a few things right. But which one is a better warning, for its time – 1932 in Huxley’s case, and 1948 in Orwells?…

The Débâcle by Emile Zola (1892) This is not one of the more enjoyable novels of the Rougon-Macquart series. Perhaps the least readable, relevant, enjoyable, insightful and important of all the novels of the series I’ve read so far. The running ranking: Nana L’Assomoir The Ladies Paradise Pot Luck…

The Beast Within (La Bête Humaine) by Émile Zola (1888) Probably not top 10 in Émile Zola’s ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’ literary cycle – it suffers from how dated the criminal psychology / sexuality stuff feels: its all quite implausible, basic and even naive – seen from a modern perspective – that…

Marvellous 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a wide-eyed octopus 🐙❤️ Excavated in 1903 from a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro, Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me #Archaeology

Number 2 in the Top 20 in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart literary cycle ‘Window-shopping’ in French is ‘lèche-vitrines’ - literally ‘window licking’ – and reading Zola’s ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ - ‘The Ladies' Paradise’ – it will becoming clear why the French language veers this way. This is a…

The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola (1883) Why is it that Zola’s novels read like ‘important books’. Every ‘serious’ novelist thinks they are writing ‘important’ books, but what separates the important from the merely ‘self-important’? Zola’s stated mission to produce - over 23 years - a…

The Genesis of Secrecy – On the Interpretation of Narrative by Frank Kermode (1980) The celebrated British literary critic, author of ‘The Sense of an Ending’ - a defining work of fiction theory – here sets out to decipher cryptic passages and concealed meanings in the gospels, with the aim of…

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) The ambiguity of so many sentences – typical of the prose of James after 1890 when he started to dictate his writing rather than writing it himself – renders this novel a difficult read. But the ambiguity is at the heart of the novella: watching a screen…

The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère (2017) A fascinating book, about a fascinating topic, by a fascinating author. I have felt compelled, and still feel compelled, to read all his works, from ‘The Moustache’ of 1986 – which is a profound work of literature, a real masterpiece of a novel – through to…

@didau.bsky.social that Binet book was a bit of a let down. Nowhere near as good as his other 3. I’m onto Kingdom now - more engrossing

Perspectives by Laurent Binet (2025) Having read all of Binet’s novels heretofore – novels which sometimes challenge what it means to be a novel – I will probably read every novel he writes. That said, his latest is a bit of a plod: the reader struggles to give a damn in the way he or she does in…

L’Assommoir by Emile Zola (1877) The 7th of the Les Rougon-Macquart literary cycle of twenty novels by Émile Zola, subtitled ‘Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire’ (Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire), follows the lives of the members of a…

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) Downtown, Manhattan, New York, 1947

BEHOLD! The voice of Odin! ".....Hai!"

CogSci: It’s not science. It’s not simple. And it’s not teaching & learning.  This diagram has enraged thousands of teachers thousands of times, because it renders something hugely complex (teaching & learning) as something pretty straight-forward. Yet, the speakers at ten thousand lecterns point…

Missing Person by Patrick Modiano (1978) This ia the sixth novel by French writer Modiano, and was awarded the Prix Goncourt. In 2014, Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, it reads, for the most part, as no more than a silly little puzzle. Who is our narrator /…

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (2014)  Another example of how a novel can get lost in the weeds of what didn’t happen. There are dreams, wonderings, musings, discussions, analysis of dreams, theorising, and all that jazz – just not much stuff happens, or when it does it happens off screen it…

The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt (2009) “There is a lot of chat in Hustvedt's new novel. Erik is a psychotherapist with some difficult clients, he's just divorced, and is falling for the young single mum, Miranda, in the flat below. His sister, Inga, was married to a famous writer, Max,…

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (2017) “Arminuta” in Italian – “the one who was returned” is another of Ann Goldstein’s translations – she seems to have corned the market in Neapolitan ignorance and deprivation. Having translated all of Elena Ferrante’s work into English, she must…

Pot Luck by Emile Zola (1883) It’s a real event, reading a Zola novel. In reading ‘Pot Luck’, the tenth novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, as with reading ‘Nana’ or ‘The Brighter Side of Life’, or ‘Germinal’, or ‘The Masterpiece’, maybe even every other novel from the series; your life is…

My favourite novels this year open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

‘A seat at the table: knowledge, inheritance and the purpose of schooling’ by D Didau Education: an ‘Academic Question’ or a ‘Real Question’. Too often asking a big question about education (or anything else) is an academic question: it should, in fact be a real question, which I think, is what…

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (1937) This is a bit of a bore for the first hundred pages or so – stuff happens from a kid’s point of view – but it’s all really, really uninteresting. The kid’s point of view isn’t at all remarkable, and the reader may well ask herself, why are we…

The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner (1920) What was, or is, a ‘landmark work in U.S. historiography’ – which contends that it was the availability of free land and the process of westward expansion that fundamentally shaped American identity – is clearly an important work…

Good morning from Haarlem. #GoodMorningFromHaarlem

Make it so ❄️

The Jolly Corner by Henry James (1908) James is at his best when the reader is held between knowing and not knowing what the hell is going on. Which is what makes his ghost stories excellent: that suspension of knowing what the hell is going on, but fearing it’s something truly awful. There’s Late…

Why I Read by Wendy Lesser (2014) Subtitled ‘The Serious Pleasure of Books’ this is maybe the most egregious example of preaching to the choir I’ve come across in a while. But, to be fair, choirs seem to like it. It’s the sinners who aren’t partial to a bit of fire and brimstone. Or even a gentle…

The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider (1982) If West German novelists did not write about the Wall, then this exception must be worth reading. Why didn’t they write about the wall, when foreigners only want to talk about, read about, imagine the wall. But our fascination only gets slightly nudged and…

Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman (1987) From the blurb, this could be a thousand other books, a dime a dozen novel, just another bash at the same old thing, nothing special, and of little consequence. And yet. as the three lives – which have no connection at all – apart from all being the lives of…

King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, (2006) A ‘blend of memoir, critical theory, and feminist manifesto’, dealing with her time as a sex worker and as an infamous female author, exploring what it means to be a woman in a male-capitalist-exploitative world, with a focus on ‘the ways in which our…

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1985) Taking, upending, subverting the traditional tropes, language, structure and mechanisms of the detective story, applying a host of postmodern tricks: the fun that Auster’s novel has, the very obvious game it is playing, brings home to the reader how all…

"What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody, is that things cannot go on in their present way" – The Times, May 1975 “It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life” – Professor Stephen Haseler, 1975

Just a Little Dinner by Cécile Tlili (2025) Shortlisted for the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Winner of the 2023 Prix Littéraire Gisèle Halimi for Women’s Writing, this is a pretty ropey novel with a cast of characters that fail to convince on every second page, fractured relationships that…

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (2003) What’s called “a novel of ideas”, “an intellectual page-turner, and “a ferociously clever book” is just a damn good novel: it changes the way you see yourself and the world around you. As you read this novel you revaluate your relationship to others, to your…

Useful summary from Chris Giles www.ft.com/content/f086...

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (2024) This is set up as a ‘metafictional quest in search of an unjustly forgotten African author’, but it’s not very metafictional in that it has very little to say about fiction, though it does have a lot to say about nothing, if a few other…

Should we just give cash to homeless people? I wrote about what the evidence shows--and a London-based charity called Greater Change that has a simple, innovative way of making a difference:

The Plains by Gerald Murnane (1982) The Deepity: Faux-profundity in literature.  Reviews of this book are predictable enough: that Murnane is a ‘difficult’ writer, but at the same time a ‘compulsively readable writer’. That he is like Kafka, Calvino, and Borges, ‘but with his own distinctive (and…