Bee-autifully crafted gold ornament in the form of a little bee 🐝 ❤️ Length 1.90 cm. From Minoan Crete, circa 1700-1600 BC. 📷 British Museum www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o... #Archaeology

Might sound an odd Christmas piece but here’s me on why arcades are the essence of London at Christmas, and of urbanity itself. www.ft.com/content/e6cd... When the shopping arcade sparkles back to enchanted life

#WhathaveIdonethisyear ? - played the stupendously glorious Hill organ at All Saints, Hove, one of the finest and least altered late Victorian instruments in Britain.

Finally, a bar I really can practise at.

“Pray tell, the Baron, what sort of gentleman is he?” “Well…”

Some Annunciations by Burlison & Grylls Rogier van der Weyden St Columba Altarpiece Stained glass 📷 @simoninsuffolk.bsky.social St Mary's, Rougham

At Neal’s Yard Dairy.

on the tramway in Nantes and a pretty old woman gave her seat to a very old woman so I gave my seat to the pretty old woman then a man gave me his seat then a teenager gave a man his seat and then we all laughed, aren't people fantastic

Fabulous font in Winchester cathedral carved with the legend of St Nicholas - bought from Tournai in the 12th century

CRICK proudly on display at D. G. Wills bookstore in San Diego, where Michael McClure gave a reading in 2000. You can watch it in the link below; Crick appears in the background of the opening shots, his back to the camera. youtu.be/ih0vCt9w8Mw?...

From the superb Félix Vallotton exhibition at MCBA Lausanne, this is one of many striking and unusual landscapes: Le rayon, 1909, Private collection. Read about the show (the best we've been to this year) on our blog: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2025/12/thro...

Drusus the Elder. Cameo by Herophilus in turquoise-blue glass paste. Modern setting: gold ring. Height 5.9 cm. Kunst­historisches Museum

Less than 2 days left to listen to 'Lo He Comes' on repeat. Here at 1:30:32 (complete with percussion and brass no less, plus killer descant) 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUd...

The owl, a symbol of the Goddess Athena, appears on this silver tetradrachm of Athens that was minted sometime between 527 & 430 BC. It is perhaps one of the most iconic coins ever struck. The design still appears on Greek coins to this day. From the Hunterian collection.

Also, great Burns bibliography compiled by Ilaria Abbondandolo. These kinds of bibliographies are invaluable historiographic tools down the line. Thanks so much @thesahgb.bsky.social! www.cambridge.org/core/service... #architecture #earlymodern #Renaissance #Palladio

Christmas appears in Pedro de Medina's "Art of Navigation"! 🎄 Nice to spot it in this 1554 Italian translation (Venice, Pedrezano) at @theul.bsky.social this morning. Note the commentary on the painless birth of Jesus: he was laid on a bed of hay because there was nothing softer to hand 🌟

Still looking for a present for a friend who loves #books or #typography? #Antwerp artist Sanny Winters created Love Letters, an ABC of love. sannywinters.be/nl/love-lett...

Day 23 and we've reached penultimate window of this year’s Coastal Lexicon Advent Calendar! Today’s word is: 🌊 strand — 'the land bordering a sea, a shore or beach' Common to Germanic, strand being the default ‘beach’ word in Dutch, German, Danish and Norwegian.

An aerial view of Christmas in central London.

Lewtrenchard Manor #Devon Such wonderful skill displayed in producing this beautiful tile-like floor made of upright slates. Once home of Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould hymn writer, folklore & folk song collector & lover of #Dartmoor. #TilesOnTuesday

How do you tune (or modulate) an instrument in ancient Babylonia? Fragmentary instructions have survived that tell you how to go from one mode to another on a 9-stringed musical instrument called a sammû

Then and Now The Little Street Delft c.1658, painted by Johannes Vermeer; now identified by archival research as 40-42 Vlamingstraat, Delft, photographed (right) in 2017. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

”Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?” Emma, by Jane Austen, published #OTD 1815. Hypothetical Map of Highbury by Penny Gay, ‘Jane Austen’s Emma’ in Horizon Studies of Literature 1995 | Jane Austen’s House, Chawton

«Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.» Il Gattopardo, historical novel of Sicilian life during Risorgimento, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, born in Sicily #OTD 1896; published posthumously to great acclaim in 1958, won Strega Prize (1959). Museo del Gattopardo, Agrigento

The Plantin archives: the gift that keeps on giving. An #earlymodern ledger for expenses on ‘white paper’ for the printing office with printed binder’s waste on its spine & a #medieval Vulgate Bible fragment as its cover. 😍 Happy holidays everybody! #rarebooks #bookhistory 💙📚📜

Christmas in Vienna. -- A tree in Herrengasse. #Vienna #photography #photographyOnBlueSky #Austria

The Norwegian public library system is the fruit of an approach to state-building in which people of all social classes & backgrounds were meant to have certain basic things for free. The ability to access a wealth of literature was one such thing. (3/n)

247 years before Christmas, my true love gave to me… '60 walnuts 5 baskets of figs 20 pomegranates and a partridge' [a pear tree] An almost festive letter sent in 247 BC! Shelfmark: Bodleian Library MS. Gr. class. c. 97 (P)

Ok, time to get serious with this whole Christmas thing. 37 down, 123 to go.

Am thinking of writing a Christmas/anniversary post about why Jane Austen is our greatest writer about law. She can deftly describe the most complex of legal relationships - entails, succession, etc - in a sentence or two. And you don’t even notice she’s done it. Awesome.

Today is winter solstice ❄️ A perfect day to align with Earth’s rhythms and find peace in winter’s beauty. 📸: Ian Brierley

The Persian Sibyl, 1647-8, by Guercino, Italian Baroque painter active in Bologna, died #OTD 1666; the pose and exotic costume of Guercino’s Sibyl inspired Mengs, Benjamin West, and Louise Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun. Musei Capitolini

Over 2,000-year-old Hjortspring boat study reveals Baltic origins and advanced seafaring long before the Viking Age A new scientific study is now casting fresh light on one of Scandinavia’s most famous prehistoric vessels... More information: archaeologymag.com/2025/12/2000... #archaeology

Happy #WinterSolstice ❄️ Today marks the official start of winter in the astronomical calendar. 📷 Instagram | Juncao_Oxford

Day 21 of the Coastal Lexicon Advent Calendar and today’s word is: bight — 'a bend in a coastline, a shallow bay' Common to Germanic, cognate with Dutch bocht, German Bucht. As in German Bight from the Shipping Forecast: "There are warnings of gales in Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight…"

The glorious cliffs of Etretat, as captured by Claude Monet in a superb show at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-.... Pictured: Etretat, l’Aiguille et la Porte d’Aval, 1885, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. Courbet, Delacroix among others on display.

We made a mistake by calling the output of AI ‘slop’. In academia it is now looking much more like toxic pollution, on the verge of laying waste to previously fertile plains. Suing for royalties is only a small part of the battle.

Merry Christmas from the City.

Astronomical #winter starts today. It's the shortest day of the year in terms of daylight with the sun starting to set later each day until Summer Solstice. The mosaic depicts the dancing Genii (protective spirits) of the four seasons. The Genius of winter is wrapped in a heavy cloak.🧵1/2 #Solstice

#AshmoleanAdvent Day 21: Snowy Bridge Today’s advent calendar treat is a woodblock print titled Yuhi Hill and Drum Bridge at Meguro by Japanese master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige. The unusual arched bridge in this wintry landscape was known as a ‘drum bridge’ because of its shape.

#FindsFriday #FishOnFriday 🏺 Very fine, and refined, Laconian Kylikes (bowls) by “Painter of the Taranto Fish”, demonstrating close links between Taranto and Sparta. Dolphins + tuna fish w central rosette, birds on outside. From tomb in central Taranto, 580-570 BC. MArTA: Taranto Nat Archaeo Museum

The gold frog. Sir John Poley's monument in the Poley Chapel at Holy Trinity, Boxted (Suffolk) shows this soldier wearing an extraordinary detail - a gold frog earring.

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

A Dance to the Music of Time, painted c. 1635 by preeminent French Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin; inspired cycle of 12 novels (1951-75), by Anthony Powell, born #OTD 1905. Wallace Collection London

The tribute money, fresco painted c. 1425 by Masaccio, early Renaissance Florentine painter, born #OTD 1401, whose naturalism and innovative use of perspective & chiaroscuro influenced Western art. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence

Christmas present to myself.

Quite a view of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge from the Woollen Mills this evening.

For many years Christmas hasn't been Christmas until the King William's College quiz is in position... buying a Guardian daily used to ensure I didn't miss it, but for anyone who, like me, has got out of that habit, here's the link: kwc.im/wp-content/u...

The complete Bayeux Tapestry has finally been released and proves that Bishop Odo had absolutely nothing to do with the illegal Norman invasion of England.