Nottingham has one of the most vibrant and forward-looking departments of modern languages around. Music too. To cut them like this, leaving no chance for future rebuilding, is educational vandalism. tinyurl.com/yr65mjkx

The eternal return wrapped around the eternal departure wrapped around the eternal return, etc. Station fractals as I bring the book back, by way of its places, to the people who are in it. Embarquement terminé? I wouldn't be so sure.

Chimneyscapes of Brussels

Foxes of Brussels , 1 of an occasional series.

Couple of Oxford-related images, all from Headington. William Kimber's grave, a couple of pubs and a slow-at-first then all-at-once sunset.

Bangor station buffet. Something for everyone

This is really good example of a headline that is completely at odds with the article's content. Good local journalism is really important but this isn't it. www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk/news/2558076...

Great to see this and also to see his later flowering of poetry given its due. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

‘It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable.’ Rosemary Hill on Martin Parr’s people: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If Labour is continuing to lose votes, just got 11% in a by-election in a seat they've held for 100 years and in a few recent polls is equal to or just behind the Greens maybe we should stop suggesting they're the only thing that can defeat Reform.

Confirming the old rule: first slowly then all at once. www.newstatesman.com/politics/wal...

Democracy cannot survive if people like Jenrick, who is prepared to lie continually and without compunction, can prosper. Football in the 80s was frequently violent and, especially in the first part of the decade, awash with racism. These were not halcyon days, especially for non-white Britons.

How long before ICE agents come for Pope Leo?

Oxford sights, in l'an trentiesme de mon eage, or at any rate my 30th Michaelmas Term as a tutor here. Not sure where the years went, somewhere between the purposeful paddleboarder and the skull on the hull.

My start of term inbox

How is this repeatedly made into a policy issue - by *all* parties - when the blunt fact of the matter is that grown adults who are obliged to pay for their own education, and relentlessly pursued to repay their loans, should be able to study whatever the fuck they want.

London-based @cbeditions.bsky.social (founded in 2007 by Charles Boyle) is a publisher of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including work in translation. Find their books (including 'Ghost Stations' by Patrick McGuinness) at #smallpublishersfair25 on Fri 24 & Sat 25 Oct: smallpublishersfair.co.uk

After the hardware shops I'm at Museum der Dinge/Museum of Things. Enjoyed the way they classify. Very taken with the Remembering and Stimulating shelves and the excellent kitsch trio: jingoistic, devotional, topical

My great pleasure visiting towns and cities: hardware shops. Not just because they're living museums of use, but bc they're like embassies of past ways of living, defiantly hanging on. Berlin has several superb examples.

From when Channel 4 was my education, my art school, my university RIP Tony Harrison

The latest issue of the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings finds me both frank and reflective. With thanks for Michael Rosenfeld for the interview and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel for my time as writer in residence. Dank u wel, het was een genoegen.

Great to be back at Pordenonelegge to read from my new book Italian translation. Blood Feather became Linea Fissa, Landline. With thanks to Interno Poesia Giorgia Sensi and Filippo Morre

I miss them

Check out the Sutton Trust's Elitist Britain 2025 report. Link to report: www.suttontrust.com/our-research... @suttontrust.bsky.social

What the future looked like in the past

Happy to be in this fantastic book from @c20society.bsky.social with my elegy for the cooling towers of Didcot. If we know how to look, these structures and their places are full of meaning and stories.

I am having a hard time reconciling "Charlie Kirk was a fierce advocate of open dialogue and free expression" with "we must identify and persecute everyone who is insufficiently mournful"

Glad to be in this month's Apollo, writing about Evan Walters's The Communist (c.1932): colour, ideas, Wales. Also mentioned: chapels, gospels and preachers (including the Manic Street variety), & being sceptical of rhetoric, like the little chap at the front. apollo-magazine.com/evan-walters...

Glad to be in this month's Apollo, writing about Evan Walters's The Communist (c.1932): colour, ideas, Wales. Also mentioned: chapels, gospels and preachers (including the Manic Street variety), & being sceptical of rhetoric, like the little chap at the front. apollo-magazine.com/evan-walters...

Here's some inspiring flag talk youtu.be/qLCCA-aI8nw?...

R.S. Thomas

A lot of police time and taxpayer money spent on protecting racists today.

2 weeks today @cbeditions.bsky.social: essays on Bouillon, Oxford, Sheerness, Bruges; the monstering of my teacher Chris Jefferies; Shopping Centres; Trains,Stations,Bridges; Mallarmé & Terrorism; Vallotton & Spilliaert; Ears. Plus vexed question of the 'Poet's Novel'. Special thanks to @lrb.co.uk

🚨 Tim Unwin Early Career Researcher Grant 🚨 Early career researcher grants of up to £500 are available to SDN members to assist with a research project related to 19th-century French studies. Send us your application by 1 September! More info here: uksdn.co.uk/ecr-grant/

Perfect timing by the EFL to arrange the Coventry vs Hull match on Larkin’s birthday. The classic Larkin derby, nature vs nurture.

This is very good

This is quite something by Pankaj Mishra harpers.org/archive/2025...

Back in Bouillon after a few months away. Wondering if these trousers at the top of the ruelle are mine, looking to see if the roof is hilding and checking in on the cinema.

Congratulations to Jeff Young, winner of this year’s TLS Ackerley Prize for his highly original and exhilaratingly written memoir ‘Wild Twin’, published by @littletollerbooks.bsky.social‬

2 pleonasms in 3 words. A record?

Becky Barnicoat on Keir Starmer as a Hinge date – cartoon

A history of, and a story about, Oxford, in its pubs, here at Florence Park community centre. Really fascinating talk by Jeremy Smith, adlibbing fantastically from Jeremy Allen's prompts. These monthly talks are brilliant.

We at the Review mourn the loss of Fanny Howe (1940-2025). In celebration of her life and work, we’ve unlocked her Art of Poetry interview, along with her poems, from our archive. buff.ly/YtQzXpd

The Pinch of Salt Path

What is the charge? Walking a path? A succulent salt path?

1. One thing you need to realise about the British Establishment is that it uses clowns to express its deepest desires. People like Rod Liddle offer a kind of deniability - "lighten up, he's just having a laugh". But they deliver a closer representation of its truths than any sober editorial.

Birmingham International station. Vignettes of the Great British railway. Especially pleased to catch the Carnation footcare corn cap factory in Sandwell and Dudley.

Some excellent news for East Oxford! The Ultimate Picture Palace has been awarded Asset of Community Value status. uppcinema.com/oxford-cinem...

Sivesters hardware shop, Magdalen Rd. It closed after over a century in 2023. I first shopped there in 1991 when I arrived in Oxford. Even when open and thriving, it seemed to be coming to to us from a different era. I wasn't expecting it to be demolished with quite such thoroughness. Flats soon.