I want one.

Calling all the PhDs I know to make monumental annoyances of themselves (and honestly, who better)

We’re not even unique here, Berlusconi basically paved the whole roadmap a decade earlier

once again, I think I'm grateful to have long ago memorized W. H. Auden's "The Fall of Rome"

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Davos Unreal

"Yma'n bys koth ow merwel, hag an bys nowydh a omladh dhe vos genys: lemmyn yth yw oos an euthviles." - Antonio Gramsci

Finland-Swedish political cartoon from 1938, by Tove Jansson the creator of Moomin. Hitler as a crying toddler that demands more cake.

The UK once quietly bumped off their king early to ensure better newspaper headlines. Just leaving that idea out there.

you know it’s absolutely lit right now. every one of them is texting hands down by their sides like they’re in class

It’s way past time for the pundits, politicians, business leaders to admit the dude has no clothes on. If y’all just say it out loud, we can begin moving on from this ridiculous grip on power.

I've had enough.

The inanity of evil

Every day we all have to think about one of the most irredeemable cunts in the history of the world. What’s he doing? What’s he said now? How will it affect your life? What will be left once he’s finished smashing it all up? It’s unconscionable

My Christ - I thought this was a joke. Fuck’ sake.

Oh my god, die already

Und thus, modernity comes to a close just like it started, with a guy ranting at windmills

Am I going mad here? He's finding it hard to speak and it seems at points to breathe, and some of his words sound slurred. And this is how it's reported. Am I getting it all wrong? 🤷‍♂️

I fear this article in The Healthy Life from 1912 on Futurist gardening may have been overlooked by modernist scholars @modernistudies.bsky.social

Yeah, you read that right. Robert Smallbones' daughter horse-whipped a Gestapo officer in the streets of Frankfurt for attacking Jews. I think you'll struggle to find a better use of diplomatic immunity...

It's just a printout of all the #Dementia tests and #MRI scans he's taken in the past year

Me when my book finally comes out but I mentally moved on two years ago.

Really good piece on Paul Potts' one successful (?) piece of writing, Dante Called You Beatrice, which is a favorite book of mine.

Orwell was entangled with another young Catholic poet discontinuednotes.com/2022/01/03/t...

Walph Blifil-Gordon is a parody of Murrough Loftus, the son of the Irish Catholic politician Pierse Loftus who is also satirised in the novel as an MP. Yes, the Hess story is true. Btw You will enjoy another minor Orwell connection with ML ;) walberswick-pc.gov.uk/news-posts/n...

someone once told me that metadata was an act of passing the torch forward & it is; it's an act of hope against the darkness and the hope of knowing in a sea of known unknowns and unknown unknowns

Murrough Loftus, author of "A Sword Unearthed", mentioned in a D.J.Taylor review a few years ago but Google turns him as a soldier a few years later guarding Hess.

FUN FACT: a minor character in Clergyman's Daughter is based on a Catholic poet who was one of the guards on the imprisoned Rudolf Hess.

“They love to hear us talk, explain our gelato flavors. We are the funny-talking people who explain flavors. They are the protagonists of history; we are not. They are slow because they are the main characters; they own their time. They own time.” www.thedial.world/articles/new...

It happens that later on today, on the anniversary of his death, I’m giving a lecture on him: I’ll *try* not to invoke today’s situation too often…

Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 42, and post the second sentence. ‘He is the proprietor of the British-African Workmen Store and he styles himself ‘Builder for the Dead, Repairer for the Living’.

"He's obviously having a very reflective afternoon."

was briefly so excited reading this until I realised he meant Davos

Congratulations also to Modernism/modernity, who took home the CELJ Best Digital Feature award for "Hope Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem @ 100" Read the feature for free at M/m Print Plus: modernismmodernity.o... 2/2

On this day 108 years ago, biographer, critic and Bloomsburyist Lytton Strachey went round Virginia Woolf’s gaff and talked dirty – and not for the first time. According to an entry in Woolf’s diary (written the following day)... 🧵

Tom Baker is 92 today

I wonder if Ancient Historians are thinking about the wilder bits in their sources anew- ‘ he clearly hated the ‘Mad Emperor’ but on the other hand perhaps this story isn’t entirely impossible’…

The document base for the ‘Age of Trump’ History Special Subject in 2045 is going to be fucking incredible. (Admittedly assuming we make it to 2045 and the subject still exists might be optimistic)

RIP German anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who passed away last Tuesday. Fabian was most widely known as the author of "Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object" (1983), a then-radical & still-influential critique of anthropological writing, knowledge-making & fieldwork relations. RIP.

I’ll bet! I’ll add that one you hear a lot is people back forming ‘Tonbridge’ with a distinct ‘o’ with ‘Tunbridge Wells’. The ‘o’ is an imposition of the Post Office in the late 19th century: the u is the normal historical spelling for the town the wells are named after.

It’s such a shame there are so few surviving of recordings of poetry on BBC radio from before the war — it would be a rich resource to study all this

You'll love academic publishing, where it's quite common for publishers just not to pay royalties if they fall below £50, as they say the admin costs of paying them are uneconomic

Gosh, yathink? The 1930s, the "Devil's Decade", were a bit rough? Wow.

This is your reminder that Hungarian-Jewish scientist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. He then left the dissolved solution on his shelf and fled to Sweden. (After the war he un-dissolved the gold and the prizes were re-cast.)

To betray your hosts like this is something that practically every society since the Bronze Age (at least) would have considered sinful.

A rich, thoughtful post about the fine difficulties of translating the Old English poem The Wanderer, including its most famous line. Perfect for a winter night! @nikgunn.bsky.social nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/01/13/b...

I quite enjoyed this bit

Holy hell, what an obituary

"All the stories about alien abduction and spaceships? They already happened. Entire mass populations moved; forcibly dematerialised. How much more alien do you think it gets than slavery?" Kodwo Eshun in The Last Angel of History