This could be awkward for the BBC: CBS News is its US partner…

I think we need more bishops - well, more people - with these names.

Excellent review by Julian Evans in the Telegraph of Mavericks. He calls it “stimulating” and gives it four stars. “Higham has written an entertaining and instructive account of how empires can be fatally weakened by overreach and arrogance…”

Art of Laundry. Georges Hugnet, Untitled (laundry and legs collage), 1933-1936. Hugnet was a French graphic artist, writer, art historian, critic and film director, and a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Gabriella Benzi. Christian Eckardt (Danish painter, 1832-1914). Drying sheets on the shore before Split, Croatia 1893. Oil on paper laid down on board…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A World of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Cover for the magazine McCall's by Hubbard Sundblom, 1933. Laundry (which was jolly hard work in reality) also lent itself to rather saccharine and sentimental treatments in art like this…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. “Wind of Change" by contemporary Russian artist Emilia Shelamova…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Rita M. Sjöholm. Iman Maleki 1976. Iranian Realist painter…

Sad news. ‘The Fields Beneath’ and ‘The House by the Thames’ are two of the best books ever written about London’s history. I hadn’t realised till I looked her up how wide was her range, or that she started by writing fiction…

London’s sewer system. A product of heroic Victorian endeavour and spectacularly over-specified engineering (which is why it’s lasted so well…!)

So Sir Terry Farrell has died, aged 87, a fortnight after his one-time architectural partner Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. Farrell was a particularly talented large-scale urbanist. An era ends.

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Emilie Mundt (1842-1922). Women washing at a well, 1880. Mundt was a Danish artist known for her paintings of children and peasants. She lived for a time in the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Britanny…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Alicia Silvia Tessari. Désiré François Laugée (1823-1896). The Laundress, 1882. He was a successful painter of historical and religious subjects who later turned towards naturalism, though one critic thought his peasants “too delicate…”

He'll hogget the lamblight.

A reminder of the last time a "prince across the water" marched on London via the NW (and he didn't even have to contend with the bond markets).

Dunsterforce’s commander was Maj-Gen Lionel Dunsterville, famous as a school friend of Kipling and model for Kipling’s schoolboy anti-hero Stalky. Dunsterforce, just 1200 strong, had no hope of saving Baku but did hold the Turks off for six precious weeks…

At Euston. Just so long as the train isn’t 200 years old…

The massacre of the 26 Commissars became one of the founding legends of the Soviet Union. And the British got the blame; in this famous painting by Ivan Brodsky there are three British officers at far left watching the execution. In reality none were closer than 200 miles away…

Just your annual reminder to raise a glass to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov who on this date in 1983 saved your life when he decided to wait for evidence in stead of passing on the message that could have caused armageddon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...

I’ll be at Lichfield Cathedral @lichfieldcathedral.bsky.social lunchtime Sunday talking about my new book Mavericks and the remarkable characters involved in the Forgotten Battle of World War One — including the brave men of the local N Staffs regiment who fought to the death in Baku…

Can anyone tell me what these are, please? They sprang up overnight next to the bins at the front of the house…

That marvellous moment when two and half years’ work materialises in physical form, as if by magic (with a great deal of help from those nice people at @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social …)

Art of Laundry. Banksy, “Zebra Stripes", 2008, Timbuktu, Mali. It seems pictures of laundry can be highly popular: this is a much-reproduced image… via Clive Norris

Art of Laundry. Via FB/PAINTERS FROM THE NORTH/Maria Tosca (with thanks to Andy Davy). Anna Maria Lindholm Rogberg (b 1972, Swedish). Hand wash (2025). Though hand washing in rivers was in reality rather harder work than this looks. Rogberg specialises in images of women and girls in landscapes…

Art of Laundry. The Bachelor 1964 Andrew Wyeth. Since washing clothes was women’s work, a man doing his own laundry was an object of sympathy: something (wife dead or ill, no wife at all) had evidently gone horribly wrong in his life… via FB/Richard Elsen

Old fire engines alert #2. Also at Snowshill Manor, two steam-driven model fire engines. They’re housed in a room with scores of vintage bikes, model carts, a model sailing ship etc, upstairs from the room full of Samurai armour. It’s a bizarre place…

Old fire engines alert #1. Among thousands of items collected by the decidedly eccentric Charles Wade at Snowshill Manor in the Cotswolds are two 18th/early 19thC hand pumps, mouldering in a shed…

Art of Laundry. Woman Ironing, Degas, 1873. At the NY Met which says: “Much as Degas was fascinated by the movements of dancers, he was also intrigued by the repetitive, specialized gestures made by laundresses.” The buyer returned the painting so Degas could rework it. Instead, he kept it…

Art of Laundry. Degas, Les Blanchisseuses, c 1878. I may have shared this before (apologies if so) but Degas made almost as many pictures if laundresses as he did if ballet dancers. With thanks to Caro Millington…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Rita M. Sjöholm. Peder Mork Monsted - Women washing clothes 1882. Monsted was a Danish landscape painter who also spent time in Italy, as this painting shows… Peder Mork Monsted (Danish, 1859-1941).

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Rita M. Sjoholm. Peder Monsted (Danish painter) 1859 - 1941 Washing Day, 1883 oil on canvas 24 × 38 cm. (9.5 × 15 in.) Monsted is best-known for his snowy winter landscapes, of which this is clearly not an example…

Art of Laundry. The Waiting by Nadezhda Vorontsova (b 1989). Vorontsova is a Russian artist who specialises in paintings of women, often (as here) pregnant. This woman is presumably “waiting” for her imminent baby… Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques

The River Cam. No, not that one but the Cam in Chipping Campden, Glos. Which flows into the R Stour (though not the Kent, Essex or Dorset Stour). Someone should write a book on British river names…

The Oxford-Worcester rail line approaching Camden Tunnel. In 1851 there was a pitched battle here involving 3,000 navvies. Brunel grew impatient with the contractor’s progress and sent his own workforce in. They fought the contractor’s men who had barricaded themselves in the half-built tunnel…

Chastleton House, Oxon, where the rules of croquet were reputedly codified by Walter Whitmore Jones in 1866…

“Yes, I remember Adlestrop — The name…”, though I’m blessed if I can remember any more of Edward Thomas’s most famous poem. The station itself has long since vanished…

Art of laundry. I suppose it was only a matter of time before AI raised its slippery head in this series of posts. These buxom Mediterranean laundresses were AI-generated by my friend Clive. And to begin with they had me fooled. I asked him who the painter was…

From a history of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge published in 1936. I so want to know who the anonymous donor was — but it doesn’t tell us…!

The scourge of child mortality. Four babies under 18 months of age dead in ten years. How could they bear it…? In Abney Park cemetery, Stoke Newington

'A swoop of swallows' by UK textile artist Rachel Wright, machine embroidered on calico with various fabrics #UnravellingWomensArt #summer

Marianne Stokes (1855-1927), Austrian painter who settled in England, considered one of the leading women artists of her time #womensart

A last testament ~ in 1890, Vincent van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise for medical treatment. During this short period he created many paintings, including this vibrant ‘Farms near Auvers’. It was still unfinished at the time of his death in July

Ghost pub. The Falcon, Queens Park, W9. Island site surrounded by busy roads. Closed 2016, awaiting demolition and redevelopment as flats. Brent Council bought it 18 months ago, but still work hasn’t started…

Off to continue recording the audiobook of this little beauty today. The good thing about reading your own work: you know exactly how it should sound. The bad thing: you see all its flaws and keep itching to rewrite it…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931). The Laundry, 1874. Boldini was an Italian painter in Paris. He was at his best with portraits of glamorous women, according to Artnet, so this may not be typical of his work…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/Chalkie Davies. The Laundress by Èdouard Pierre Frere (1819-1896). Frere was a painter of rather sentimental domestic genre subjects, mostly featuring children…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Nakia Kiyono. “More Clothes to Clean," By George Hughes, 1948. Hughes (1907-1990) was a popular illustrator and magazine cover artist and a neighbour of Norman Rockwell in Arlington, Va. Late in life he switched to become a successful portrait painter…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Patricia Polacco. Polacco is a prolific US children’s author and illustrator who began her career as an art restorer…

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Saripa Patimah who writes: “Wishing you a wonderful weekend. ‘A Time of Flowers’, gouache on watercolour paper”

Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Elizabeth Spence who writes: “This is a panel from The Great Tapestry of Scotland. It’s a woman at the Steamie — the communal laundry where all the women met. My favourite panel of course!”