We are at it again! Myself & the wonderful @rcolesworthy.bsky.social😍 Seeking pubs -- articles, book chapters, monographs -- by contingent lit scholars for the 2025 list 👇👇 please spread the word!!! contingentmagazine.org/2024/12/08/2...

Now is obviously the perfect time for me to remind you of two early 20th c. passport facts that always entertain me: (1) the most common adjective used to describe peoples' facial features (forehead, nose, mouth, you name it!) was "medium"; and (2) Ezra Pound had an imperial chin.

"Nobody, she reflected, ever brings their real selves with them on to a tube train. None of us have. We have all left our identities behind in some vast spiritual Left Luggage office..." #BookSky #Books #CrimeFiction #CeliaFremlin 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2024/09/03/a...

So, so good - tense right until the end and filled with black humour and wry domestic insight. Here's hoping @faberbooks.bsky.social reprints all of Fremlin's work. Just love her writing.

No better train companion. #CeliaFremlin #FaberandFaber

Teaching this this week for the first time which I'm excited about but also nervous about because, as #CeliaFremlin writes, "It is rare for any catastrophe to seem like a catastrophe right at the beginning." Uncle Paul (1959), p.1. #suspense #idoliketodiebesidetheseaside #holiday

“The resource over which they hold custody is of great worth to the country …Would Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi and George Orwell, all erstwhile users of the British Library, have produced their masterpieces without this resource?” Imperilled culture - it really is. Such negligence.

Re-reading this for a thing, and it really is blisteringly good. #CeliaFremlin

Actually, folks, this is not phrenology (feeling the bumps on the skull) as people are saying in comments, it is physiognomy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiog... a similarly exploded 'science'. (What it is to be C19th quackery nerd.)

Well, since there's already a return in certain circles to preserving the precious manly bodily fluids and eschewing The Heinous Synne of Onan, can phrenology be far behind? Did I not notice the other day a mention of magnets for some ailment? Bring back hydropathy!

WAC wrong-headedness (that's the BBC Written Archives Centre) I've brought together the key links for the campaign against the changes which now make independent and exploratory research at WAC impossible - and why this matters. www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/wac-wrong-he...

Not enough attention is being paid to the effective closure of the bulk of one of the 2 or 3 most important public archives for modern British history. A terrible own goal for the BBC as a public-service agency.

The perfect photo to challenge narratives of progress.

Thrilled to share that Killing Children in British Fiction has been jointly awarded the @bacls.bsky.social Monograph Prize 2025. Thanks to judges; huge congratulations fellow winner @dremmaparker.bsky.social and shortlisted @olihaslam.bsky.social @gabriele-lazzari.bsky.social. bacls.org/news/187/

This may be one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

Strongly feel that adults learning a new language should be treated like babies doing the same thing. Look, I'm going through a developmental leap this week, so I'm just going to be more cranky, hungrier, cry a lot at night etc.

The Combat, 1939, by Leslie Gilbert Illingworth (1902–1979).

If you know me, you know that I don't stand for made up food rules, gatekeeping, the idea that cultures can't change etc. All that said: queueing at a traditional pub is an obscenity, and an erosion of a genuine, unique cultural tradition up with which we should not put.

I found Hours Before Dawn almost unbearable creepy. Maybe not entirely my thing, but very, very effective.

I'm a bit lukewarm on Fremlin based on the stories in the previous collection I read but ‘Tuesday's Child’ in this... Crikey. A man whose wife is slowly dying meets his girlfriend every week at the disco where they turn themselves on by discussing her condition, revelling in their own good health.

So this is what I look like as I explain Communism to an unfortunate ten-year-old. Who now theoretically knows useful words like ‘millenarian’ and ‘teleological’.

A new special issue of English Studies I'm really keen to put together! Please consider submitting and circulate widely! @drchrislouttit.bsky.social bookshoplit.com/cfp-booksell...

For once free to do a proper Bonfire Night (fireworks launched off pub roof)!

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

One of my favourite buildings, and the first image is one of my favourite works of art.

Turns out this news was in the public domain yesterday but no one has covered it as far as I can tell. Does no one care about our national library anymore? It was much the same with the cyberattack. If this was a bit of 'science' infrastructure can you imagine? www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

New Post! sordya.net/2025/10/29/a... The final part of our interview series in which Sordya sat down with academic and Cornish activist Bernard Deacon to talk about his involvement in Kernow's organising, this time about intersectionality and the #Cornish language. #Cornwall

The Orwell Society Prize for Dystopian Fiction 2026 is now open for submissions from people studying at a UK university: orwellsociety.com/charitable-a... If you work in UK HE, please publicize widely! I’ve been a judge since the prize’s inception; it’s such a privilege to read the submissions.

Looking forward to going to this - Shiben Banerji is doing some of the most interesting work on the interwar period I know: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/shibe... @modernistudies.bsky.social, could you share? Highly recommended for Modernist Studies people!

Just under a month to submit your proposals for panels, papers, roundtables, and workshop/seminar proposals for the joint BAMS/MSA 2026 Weird Modernisms Conference. Let's get weird! Full details can be found here: www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

I love walking around a corner and seeing something like this.

Given that the academic arts and humanities, the creative industries, and the arts sector all retain - despite challenges - both a broad and deep reach across the UK, one might imagine that by chance if nothing else there would be a few senior politicians with genuine interests in them, and yet...

“Research is vitally important to our economy in ways that we can precisely quantify, and to our shared futures in ways we can’t begin to imagine. That is why it is of the utmost importance that we do not fund it. We are very serious people.”

Portrait of an Orwellian.

A report from The #Orwell Society about the recent trip to #Polperro #Cornwall! orwellsociety.com/polperro-aut...

He’s done it again! Orwell studies are much in debt to Darcy; the least I can do is buy him a pint when I meet him later today!

Ann Savage bullies a Hitler-faced pumpkin for Halloween 1942 publicity: “Green-eyed starlet Ann Savage is about to give this Hitler-pumpkin a poke in the nose. With the way things are going in Stalingrad, it’s hard to imagine why the old boy should be smiling.”

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

I have looked upon the works that were in an antique land and which you were probably saving for eternity Forgive me they were decayed so boundless and so bare

"The English profs keep sweeping our work under the rug, but that rug is about three feet off the floor by now, and things are coming out from under it and eating the English profs." (Ursula K. Le Guin, Prospects for Women in Writing, 1986)

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

She also killed various people late in life, though that’s not the sort of thing that one puts on a biography like this perhaps!

Indeed.

Very true, although at least three errors - not born in Kent; almost certainly didn’t char whilst at Oxford; War Factory was all her own work.

Minority representation on TV causes outrage From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

I love that he says he likened Trump to Amin as a compliment… Soyinka has seen off more dictators than most; I know who my money’s on.

"The Nobel laureate has previously held permanent residency in the US but renounced it in 2016, tearing up his green card.... "He said his recent comparison of Trump to Uganda's dictator - 'Idi Amin in white face' - may have contributed to the current situation."