Really pleased to be helping bring @keithkahnharris.bsky.social’s extremely cool and very heavy book - my second commission from my time at HarperNorth over the summer - to the world! 🤟

Shame on everyone who made this happen. Also, Woodcraft Folk forever.

Hard to read this and not feel a flare of righteous fury at the absolute cruelty that underpins the anti-trans movement. Just diabolical to force a tiny number of girls and young women out because you've let your twitter algorithm convince you they're dangerous. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

This is lovely: www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/d...

From Stoppard’s Arcadia:

Really sorry to hear this. Studying and watching Arcadia with Rufus Sewell at the National in the early nineties was the first time I saw a non-Shakespeare play live and it was formative. I much recommend Hermione Lee's fairly recent biog of him, too.

Depressingly well-made point.

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I wrote about the anti-vax conference that was taking place at my hotel during the Texas Book Festival. lithub.com/amid-the-mah...

Trans rights are human rights and if you think otherwise you can fuck off, cos i don't wanna know ya. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈💜💜💜💜

Me at the LRB blog on the atrocious refugee policy of Mahmood and Starmer

The Home Secretary says "we have become the destination of choice in Europe, clearly visible to every people smuggler and would-be illegal migrant across the world" That is a factually untrue claim: the Home Office shows that the UK is fifth, getting 1/10 claims, while Germany gets 1/5 claims

Labour are making the far right happy. Just not anyone else. We need an alternative. join.greenparty.org.uk

The remarkable story we discussed this morning. (No paywall but do consider subscribing.) www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-e...

Three points I keep repeating 1. Left and liberal voters actually really exist 2. The right and "centre" are trying to rule without liberals - they are way out over their skis 3. Reports of right wing total information control are greatly exaggerated

So the Telegraph’s “BBC bias dossier” - supposedly written by ex-BBC adviser Michael Prescott - is being used to claim there’s a rogue LGBT+ unit “censoring” gender-critical voices inside the BBC. Let’s look at what’s actually in it. Spoiler: it’s nothing but recycled transphobic talking points! 🧵

Amazing work this!

The planet is dying. I know the fight against fascism feels so acute, but there will be nothing left to fight for if we don't bring these longer term challenges. Please - will you support our climate litigation?

I have Issues with the concept of writers block, such that I wrote a post on it. kjcharleswriter.com/2019/11/13/w... There are a ton of things you can do if you're struggling to write, and none of them require using the theft-based environment-ruining plagiarism machine.

We all need publishers like Salt. Please share and support if you can.

‘When Asa Briggs left school, there were only fifty thousand university students in the whole of Britain. Today, to a substantial degree because of Briggs’s campaigns and ideas, there are more than three million in higher education.’ Neal Ascherson on the historian: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Congratulations @profilebooks.bsky.social !

I'm planning to set up a food delivery business, but don't want to pay the people who make the food. If they won't give me free food, they'll kill my business.

Those tedious and mysteriously funded transphobes want to limit access to the Ponds so I’ve had a pleasant 10 mins filling this out on why seeing a variety of women is magic and judging by what people look like or can do is very slippery territory hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds.commonplace.isn

Very pleased to have acquired this for HarperNorth in my time there - it’s an incredibly important and powerful book, of course, but also one written with verve and great imaginative energy by Bill. Coming atcha in May next year:

Frame this. Hang it in every primary school classroom in the UK. Organise a daily pledge of allegiance. #KidLit #KidLitUK

Vigdis Hjorth has been my best new fiction reading this year. I’ve read her Will and Testament, If Only and now this. She does the fraught and ever-lasting emotional turmoil of families better than anyone. Thank you @versobooks.bsky.social

This is great

The truth: we need migration. The problem: too many politicians are terrified to say it. Why? They're led by a) toxicity of the charlatans & b) wealthy media organisations who demand these useful distractions rather than us talking about inequality. Reject it. Draw the line.

Suspecting as I do that, were I born ten or fifteen years later, I might’ve been taken in by at some manosphere nonsense I read quite a lot about it. This is up there with the best, not least in its giving no quarter to ‘understanding’ manosphere influencers’ prejudices and hatreds:

This was really astonishingly good, a contender for the best novel I’ve read this year @colwillbrown.bsky.social @jonathancape.bsky.social

Wow Sally Rooney. Fair play. ‘I feel obliged to state once more that… I too support Palestine Action. … If the British state considers this "terrorism", then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.’

Arresting the poets are we? Not a good look.

This is characteristically outstanding from Dan:

Made my greatest-ever single edit today:

This benefits nobody. Legalising it, however would stop migrants being exploited, enable businesses to function, reduce crime and cut waiting times for food deliveries

This, on the frailties of human bodies fighting the passage of time and Ozzy Osbourne’s last gig, is well worth a read. thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

Breaking News: Ozzy Osbourne has died at 76. The lead singer of Black Sabbath helped invent heavy metal before becoming a reality TV star on “The Osbournes.”

This is amongst the very finest art humankind has produced. RIP Ozzy: youtube.com/watch?v=K3b6...

11:30pm, New Year’s Eve, 2014, I get a text message. “Look this up. Move fast,” it said. “Do not contact the court clerk.” And so it was that I spent the stroke of midnight in 2015 sitting under a kitchen counter reading the first court document to accuse Prince Andrew of sexually abusing a minor.

honker sylvia plath piece out today and yes it did cause me to write poetry again

🚀 We’re #hiring a PhD student to join our research project – “Talking Empire – Prime Ministerial Rhetoric and the Search for a Usable Past in Post-Imperial Britain (1960-2025)” 🇬🇧 – funded by the Carlsberg Foundation! 👉 fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... 📅 4 Sep 2025

Jo is absolutely right here: it's not just our moral compass that we have lost, but our entire sense of perspective and scale. Utterly shameful.

I was really sad to hear of Richard’s death. We worked together for years at Icon and I always looked up to him. He was dazzlingly clever and often riotously, mordantly funny. He was the publisher - the guy - I wanted to be when I grew up, and that’s still true. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

Hang on a second - 51% don't want the defense spending increase at all, 57% don't want taxes to rise for it and 53% don't want other spending to be cut. These are all very similar numbers, there's nothing very contrary or inconsistent here at all.

G, by Zaffar Kunial

This is an outstanding piece, me and @drkerryandrew.bsky.social were falling about:

“I agree with Nick.” Kill the industry, you say? That sounds tough for that industry. Which industry was that again? Oh. The stealing industry? Maybe killing that industry wouldn’t be such a bad thing? Considering it’s kind of a bad industry. Unlike the other one, which it’s currently killing.

Big day to be a fisheries historian (fishtorian). Big day. When it comes to oily fish, the export market has always been the focus of British commerical fishing. Prior to the First World War, British fishing was dominated by the North Sea herring fishing; herring outweighed every other fish (1/?)