Burns Night cocktails

Save the Date: 14th International Walter Scott Conference in Edinburgh, 2027 Details on the blog: www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=6280

So looking forward discussing Romanticism with these fantastic people in beautiful Cork.

It’s Penguin Awareness Day which seems like a great excuse to post the greatest ever Wikipedia edit.

Uh-oh

New year’s sky

Happy New Year

If it’s Saint Stephens day it’s time for leftover beef and colcannon. The best meal of the holidays.

Christmas cocktails: the Bee’s Knees

Well, this should buy some Christmas gruel

Late afternoon light over Manhattan.

Snowy Central Park

Literal earthquake in my sleepy home village. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Universities Committee in Scottish Literature launches the new Scottish Literary Studies Book Prize. The prize will be awarded biennially starting in 2026; nominations close 31 March 2026. Full details, and a nominations template, can be found here: ucsl-scotland.com/scottish-lit...

This quote from the Atlantic is right & true! One odd thing is how these points, which have been obvious for several years to anyone who spent five minutes considering how LLMs work & what education is, are finally coalescing into the standard take from the center of middlebrow opinion—why only now?

Very sad to hear of the death of Tom Stoppard. I was so moved by his final play, Leopoldstadt, that when I was in Vienna a couple of years later I went to Leopoldstadt and sat there replaying it in my mind.

St Andrews Eve dinner.

My lovely students in my Victorian Gothic class made me this Christmas Card. It’s a work of genius.

This is my ideal image of philosophy--Shaftesbury and his brother in their lounge wear.

I love a Chartist

Spent the weekend reading this. When you give it the time that readers had in 1820s, it becomes compulsive. A thriller with a twisty plot, multiple well-drawn characters, and a narrative that keeps everything in place.

Wonderful afternoon of Purcell and his friends from the Dunedin Consort. His sense of music being the most important thing there is is restorative.

Whooo

Some things stay the same in Berlin #Fernsehturm

A reminder that pg researchers and ECRs working in Romantic Studies in the UK are invited to apply for a Stephen Copley Research Award (valued up to £500) The late Stephen Copley supervised my PhD and I appreciate seeing his name live on like this #Romanticism www.bars.ac.uk/main/index.p...

It’s so good to hear the wonderful work that people are doing in Scottish literature. A convivial and stimulating afternoon.

Frozen treats … if you’re a polar bear.

Notre Dame has spruced up pretty well

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

The scenes on our streets are shameful consequences of decades of austerity - government after government fanning the flames of anti migration instead of tackling inequality. We can & must make different choices. Solidarity to all communities under attack. We stand together.

Congratulations to @drleith.bsky.social and Kevin James for this wonderful volume and for inviting me to write about spies.

The only suitable replacement for Melvyn on In Our Time

At Port of Leith Distillery with the bro.

The Andy Goldsworthy exhibition at the National Gallery is terrific if your in Edinburgh before November

Back from Orfeo ed Eurydice at the Festival. A superb updating of 18th c music and dance. And despite all the war on such things, it sold out a 3,000 seat theatre.

Apparently in the 1930s academics could pay for their summer holidays by writing reviews and articles, or at least a book on English lyric poetry.

Acquired a copy of Upton Sinclair’s spy novel World’s End and it had this inscription. “Head high and don’t give up hope for a better world”. But who was Karl and what was he doing in Glasgow in 1943?

Long lunch after a Queens Hall concert. @jennyrichards.bsky.social

Whiskey sours anyone?

Had a preview of the library's acquisition of this fabulous collection of Walter Scott character portraits. The artist much preferred illustrating feisty heroines, and although he does feel he has to include the most famous hero, Ivanhoe is a complete fop.

Look at these pommes boulangère that I made.

This thread nails everything that has gone wrong with universities.

Just donated to the restoration of the place I learned to swim. Then a freezing purgatory only made bearable by wagon wheels and hot vimto, but in the future a sun-drenched aquatic paradise (apparently). Anyway, best of luck to them.

Classic Freudian humour.

‘England’s higher education system risks long-term decline unless ministers overhaul their “confused, if not incoherent” approach to universities’ FT interview with outgoing @britishacademy.bsky.social President Julia Black where she pulls no punches! www.ft.com/content/3162...

Love the way these booze ads promote drinking in the face of grotesque outcomes: www.alcoholprofessor.com/blog-posts/b...

But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream, Fitful and dark, Unseizable in Leith And wildered by the Forth… —Hugh MacDiarmid, “Midnight” published in The Complete Poems (1978) #BookWormSat

Summer evenings