I’m really excited about this @the-rsc.bsky.social from late January: www.rsc.org.uk/all-is-but-f...: and delighted to be chatting with the brilliant Whitney White after the performance on 19 Feb. Do come!

Kazimir Malevich, redacted

Robert Fludd, redacted

What are they hiding?

2025 has been a very busy year here at EMC. We supported thousands of students and teachers through our courses, conferences and resources this year and hope for more of the same in 2026!!

Just catching up with @cjfaraday.bsky.social ‘s brilliant Story of Tudor Art. Highly recommended. www.hive.co.uk/Product/Chri...

I can't do a poll, but I can make an executive decision, so🥁🥁🥁 I'll be starting my EIGHTH #SlowShakespeare daily blog on 1 January: #MoonMad aka Midsummer Night's Dream. Because we could all do with some laughs & a bit more fairy-dust right now... (Gwendoline Christie as Titania at the Bridge, 2019)

Pascale Aebischer reviews Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2025 production of Titus Andronicus, dir. Max Webster. 🎭: www.rsc.org.uk/titus-andron... 📰: muse.jhu.edu/article/974942 📷: Marc Brenner, (Titus Andronicus)

Folks - I am quoted in National Geographic on #Hamnet #Shakespeare!!! 🤩 It energises me to continue research on Shakespeare biofiction with @kscheil.bsky.social and editing our 50 chapter Shakespeare biofiction Handbook - out with Palgrave in 2026! www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

Well hot damn. Progress. A temp manuscript catalog is back.

Happy Hanukkah!

Congratulations to the wonderful Medieval and Early Modern Orients @memorients.bsky.social team for a hugely successful inaugural conference and especially for making it accessible and fully hybrid. So grateful and humbled ❤️❤️

Looking again at Last Days - and a terrific Ariodante observer.co.uk/music/classi...

Last minute pre-Christmas self-promotion: The Haunted Wood has been named top non-fiction paperback of the year in The Times (and in the Guardian’s top 30). So feel free to buy a copy for a loved one…

God, I just want trans people to be fulfilled as people - not as totemic figures of left wing victory, not placeholders for liberal tolerance. Just as whatever we are. Whatever our vocations, our loves, our ambitions. We're political footballs for the right, but also for the left. I want more.

It's a real thing... when the first proofs arrive, a manuscript turns into a book. „The Traveller" comes out on 2 June 2026.

Here's the curtain call last night - we had a ball, with the brilliant Lee Mack, Miles Jupp, Richard Ayoade, Paterson Joseph, KCs and judge - and Professor Emma Smith @oldfortunatus.bsky.social who stole the show. A big thank you to Josie Rourke and all at CSSF.

Never thought I’d ever be a part of an Oscar campaign, however unlikely, but then again we do live in interesting times

Brilliant choice of Misha Glenny for In Our Time! He interviewed me at the Vienna Humanities festival a few weeks ago and he had the perfect wide-ranging interests and intelligence. As a fan of IOT I am cheering. www.bbc.com/mediacentre/...

Solidarity with every trans person struggling to keep their heads in the game today. Along with everything else, this is absolutely a war against our collective and individual mental and emotional health - against our very sense of self. It's expected to feel the blow. But we stay fighting.

Attention #EarlyModern and #Shakespeare friends: join me on this Giving Tuesday in donating to an Open Access fund for Meghan C. Andrews’s book. Cancer took Meghan from us in 2023, but her legacy can live on. Share widely!

“Enter an Anticke habited in Parchment Indentures, Bills, Bonds, Waxe Seales, and Pen, and Inkhornes, on his breast writ, I am a Scrivener” --- Robert Davenport: A Pleasant and Witty Comedy: Called, A New Tricke to Cheat the Divell (London, 1639) #Jacobean #Renaissance #law #drama #theatre #plays

TODAY! I'm looking forward to speaking about my book **Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature** at 5.15pm GMT - come along online or in person (Queen's College, Ox) @obs1922.bsky.social

The next Stevenson Lecture (25 Feb 2026) will be delivered by @oldfortunatus.bsky.social (University of Oxford). ‘Richard Oswald’s Library: Slavery, Collecting, and the Invention of Rare Books’ will be free to attend but booking essential. Link below 👇

‘By 1790, one in eight Liverpool households were dependent on the slave trade.’ John Kerrigan on Liverpool, the Atlantic slave trade and m. nourbeSe philip’s long poem 𝘡𝘰𝘯𝘨! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Extract from my new book in the Guardian today! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

Oxford Modern Languages is holding an online info session for graduate degrees - DPhil, MPhil, MSt in Modern Langs, or Yiddish, or Slavonic Langs, and new MSt in translation: November 19, 5-6 - pass on to students - register here events.teams.microsoft.com/event/e2549b...

There is still time to apply for one of our 50+ Visiting Fellowships @bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the 2026-27 academic year! A vibrant interdisciplinary research centre in the heart of one of the world’s great libraries!

Fortinbras: no words... EXEUNT. FINIS. THE END. www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... And so it ends... Branagh carried off, and in his coffin in the 1996 film; Andrew Scott in a publicity image for the Almeida production in 2017.

Senior Librarian role in Oxford👇 www.asc.ox.ac.uk/fellow-libra...

One for the bibliophiles out there This painting was flagged up in a book I am reading atm (Portable Magic @oldfortunatus.bsky.social ) and whilst I'm pretty sure I have seen it before it hadn't really lodged in my memory I give you Giuseppe Arcimboldo's c 1566 painting, The Librarian

I probably shouldn't tell anyone this but apparently it's Fountain Pen Day on Friday and Cult Pens has 10% off all week to celebrate: cultpens.com/collections/...

Major in Africana Studies or any humanities course like English Literature! You could be mayor of New York City. You could do anything.

Paddleboarding witch, 1643. Featured in Jon Crabb's essay "Woodcuts and Witches" about the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone so familiar today publicdomainreview.org/essay/w...

The ’king’ & ‘queen’ travelled along the Thames on golden leopards, and ’Indian pages’ carried ingots of silver and gold. This spectacle exhibited stereotypes about the Americas, but also, perhaps, a knowledge of the longstanding metalworking traditions of peoples including the Incas and Muiscas.

On this day in 1611 — days before the first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Tempest — the inauguration of a new Lord Mayor of London involved an elaborate pageant featuring English subjects dressed up as Indigenous Americans ‘from the rich and Golden Indian mines’. #goldenworld

Image: Program for The Tempest, Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration, New York, 1916. The cover shows Caliban. Program Collection, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 4/

I saw one of the final previews @the-rsc.bsky.social at the weekend & concur; it made terrifying sense as a world, I LOVED what it did with the priest, the SPACE, & Lia Williams is astonishing. Whole run sold out, can we have a transfer as a little treat? www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/o...

Our OWC/English Faculty #Shakespeare webinar series continues! Next up, Henry VIII on 3 Nov at 6pm. Join @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and @laurajaynewright.bsky.social to explore the play & how we might approach it differently in the twenty-first century. All welcome! FREE but registration required

"Parking is such sweet sorrow"

I don't like linking to wretched Am*z*n but a sample of my book has just appeared (most of the introduction, it looks like, and the plates!) and, well, I hope you like it. Proper publication next month. EEEEEK. www.amazon.co.uk/Textile-Shak...

How long can the C of E continue its privileges as the established church? www.reuters.com/world/uk/chu...

a tiny bit of good news is that we have secured funding to digitize john milton's copy of holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587). the images will form part of MILTON'S LIBRARY, an open-access site featuring the 10 books positively identified as milton's w/ transcriptions/translations of his marginal notes.

Do join me and @callanid.bsky.social to talk buck baskets, feisty wives and small town Tudor life👇

Really enjoyed talking to Philippa Gregory about Cromwell, Tudor slang, historical fiction and tyranny for the new podcast

Will is one of the best people I know to talk to about poetry: £20 for 2 hours of his time is a bargain

'This glamorous Life writing began early. Weeks before Marlowe’s untimely and violent death, a shady intelligencer called Richard Baines had drafted the outline of the playwright’s afterlife' Emma Smith: Our ideas of Christopher Marlowe

At @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk on Tuesday: Fiona Stafford speaks to Jenny Uglow about her new book, A Year with Gilbert White, which chronicles the work of the Hampshire clergyman who became the father of British natural history. Just a few tickets are left: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jenny-uglo...

Here's a film of his long, searing 1980s poem V. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu3Z...