Fuck me did the King just quote T.S. Eliot? Nearly spat my spouts out… #tseliot #toilets #kingsspeach

Nadolig llawen, merry Christmas , Caernarfon

Festive florilegium of reviews of local Morrisons , tempered by the realisation that I know most if not all the people evoked in these comments. Da iawn dre, yma wyf innau i fod.

Y Foryd, some elemental views

Also in 2026, my cross-channel Modernisms book. Starts with Mallarmé and Yeats, finishes with Derek Mahon's translations , by way of TE Hulme, Lynette Roberts, TS Eliot and the NRf , Rosemary Tonks, Odilon Périer, the birth of avant-garde theatre and other things.

After foxes of Oxford, writers' cats of Paris. Here seen modelling Gilles Ortlieb's study.

Always feel privileged to see this fox outside my house , to spend that moment being looked at and looked into , before it turns and goes.

So glad these 2 bikes have finally met. Magdalen Rd.

Promising start

Watching this shape up, due out early next year, produced with my colleagues Clément Dessy and Stefano Evangelista. On literature, art and travel, on symbolism, decadence and globalisation, and on the movement of ideas and *people* across borders.

Happy Themes Water hosepipe ban lift-day to all 'customers' who celebrate.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025 is ‘And the Walls Became the World All Around’ by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Sigrid Rausing and published by @grantabooks.bsky.social !

A brilliant workshop on class in French literature at @stannescollege.bsky.social finished with an inspiring talk by Maurice East on Working Oxford. Made possible by the @britishacademy.bsky.social organised by @hollylangstaff.bsky.social and me. More projects and events planned...

Inviting

Late to listen in, as I've been travelling, but it was a pleasure to be on The Verb to speak about the poetry of trains and stations with Carmen, Don and Bella. Ian's Beeching joke was our terminus. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Lôn las, Caernarfon

Trouble is, the buck doesn’t stop any more.

Shit and inhumane ideas that drive away your natural voters without attracting your less natural voters, part 150. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A few pictures from Charleroi, Belgium's industrial capital, home of coal, steel and glass (and literature). Sunset Triptych; maison des 8 heures (ref to the 8/8/8 work/leisure/sleep law); a bucolic hill that's a coal mound; a cathedral rebuilt.

Enjoyable but poignantly Kleistian moment in our culture here:

Such a great shortlist - was at the ceremony last year when the winner was the brilliant Nelly Sachs translated by Andrew Shanks @carcanet.bsky.social . Great to see another poet, Krisztina Tóth @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social, in the running this year.

Just in case we didn't have enough examples of how appeasement never works... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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"