He spent all his time fighting battles, Dressed up in most rigid attire, For he had his suits made by the blacksmith, And his underwear knitted of wire. (Marriott Edgar, Richard Coeur de Lion)

This kind of unhinged culture war is being waged against all our public institutions.

The Sherman Crab mine flail was so much more than a mine clearer. The spinning drum was equally at home wrecking barbed wire and, on Sword Beach on D-Day, Sgt Walter Smyth used it to destroy a German 75mm AT gun. 🎥 IWM A70 5-2, A70 85-3, A70 5-1 & A70 14-8

Old school and a classic of the genre.

“But museums haven’t collected this stuff. The curators are no longer experts: the fans are citizen curators. They’ve done us a service by keeping things and being encyclopaedic.” Behind every museum started as one person's idiosyncratic obsession are stores full of old crap.

I'm glad I returned to this after initially feeling like it was more of the same after The Power of the Dog. It is, but Winslow is just such a terrific storyteller.

The dreams in which he's dying are the best he's ever had.

I'm resisting the temptation to sacrifice your sensibilities for my likes.

When the French captured the Mont Cornillet tunnels during 3rd Battle of Champagne #OTD 20 May 1917, they found all the Germans inside killed by phosgene & carbon monoxide, & sealed the tunnel. In 1974-5 the remains of 321 soldiers were recovered. Retouched photograph: The Sphere, 1/9/1917.

Churchill’s desperate diplomatic missions to the USA may have had something to do with Britain’s national survival.

#GreatWar #Poetry (The Wipers Times, No. 2, Vol. 1, 26 February 1916)

Masking and painting the upper wing roundel (Type B) on a Spitfire. The red centre circle has been sprayed freehand (the circles had been marked); the blue outer circle is masked by hand and sprayed. From 'Streamline Colour', 1944. IWM (AMY 390)

A trench messenger dog with paws injured by sulphur mustard ('mustard gas'), Army Veterinary Corps kennel near Nieppe Wood, France, 19 May 1918. Photo by Thomas Aitken. #OTD #WW1 Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

Find out more and plan your visit now buff.ly/3iv8CkK

Alice Williams of 85 Gladstone Avenue, Wood Green, London, who died of TNT poisoning while working as a munitions worker #OTD 18 May 1916. Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

Flower Day in aid of Styrian war disabled, war widows and orphans, Austria-Hungary #OTD 18 May 1919, artist unknown. #WW1 Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

"Gas Station" Photo by Dorothea Lange. Kern County, California. January 1938. Ref CIRC.121-1973, V & A Museum.

Saw this tonight. The plot is a mess (I was with an art 'restorer' and that's really not what they do) but McKellen's beautiful magniloquence has a counterpoint in Coel's mesmerising presence that is somehow enhanced by her deadpan South London.

Men of 45 Commando come ashore on Sword Queen Red Beach at approx 09:10 on 6 June 1944. On the right is the burning Sherman Crab tank of Lieutenant John Allen, knocked out by the anti-tank gun in the bunker just visible in the very top left corner of the image. 📷 IWM A70 31-2

If you are tired of yesterday's competition novel-bragging, may I commend William Hootkins' reading of Moby-Dick? His sublime performance lives up to the genius of Melville and it's 24 hours and 49 minutes long!

Shirley is a merciless reviewer.

By someone in a bear costume?

#SundayMorning has arrived once again so here's our traditional start to the day, Cecil Osborne's iconic view from his window at 221, Farringdon Road Buildings of "Sunday Morning, Farringdon Road" from 1929. The painting is in the collection at Brighton & Hove Museums. #CecilOsborne #EastLondonGroup

Evening, After A Push, by Colin Gill, 1919. IWM (Art.IWM ART 1210)

The actual painting is a lot different from the image posted below. www.nga.gov/artworks/613...

Would dearly like to buy (or borrow) a copy of this book. Private publication so rare! Does anyone have a copy lurking on their shelves please?

I'm not sure how to define this cultural moment but today in the UK The Satanic Verses is a Kindle 99p deal.

While we are discussing the new James Bond, for once thankfully no one is suggesting that we remain true to the books.

Seeing as everyone's counting, it's 27/100, plus several started & abandoned. I gave up on 2 Kafkas & a Sebald (Bill Bryson without jokes). The criteria for 'great' seems to involve an element of being made to enjoy what's good for you, so I'd like to have seen a Dorothy L. Sayers & a John le Carré.

Here we go.

With a pleasing informality that is not at all extremely annoying and stupid, The Guardian has listed its 100 Best Novel voters alphabetically according to their first names.

My wife's just sent me a photo from the Antwerp waterbus and it turns out those 17thC painters were on to something.

Lines that have stayed with me since the early 1980s: Heard of a van that's loaded with weapons Packed up and ready to go Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway A place where nobody knows

My Irish grandfather took this footage on a visit to family in 1932. It's possibly capturing the now-removed fishing village of Claddagh in Galway that had distinct thatched roof houses and their own elected king. It could also be Aran Islands (the girl on the donkey in particular). Or both?

A 1975 aerial view of #OldOswestry - note the training trenches dug during the First World War. Protecting the archaeology wasn't high on the list of priorities at the time. #HillfortsWednesday #Shropshire #FWW 📷 Cambridge Air Photos, CUCAP BVQ9.

Aerial photo of the Butte de Vauquois. #OTD 14 May 1916 the Germans detonated 50 tonnes of explosives beneath the French front line, forming the huge crater on the right & killing 108, but made no attempt to capture the position. One of the largest of the war, equalled by a French mine in May 1917.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

The claim 'families and children don't want long labels about provenance' (from a German provincial museum not the Met) is the depressing end to this shocking story about curatorial negligence.

Curators smoking at work, a brief yet horrifically fascinating series: 1. Major Charles ffoulkes, the first Curator and Secretary of the Imperial War Museum, c1917-18. Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

On 1 Nov '44 the Allies deployed the Land Mattress operationally for the first time, bombarding a German Flak battery at Zwanenburg during the assault on Flushing. German PoWs reported it "provoked an immediate tendency to assume the horizontal position". 🎥 IWM A70 237-2 & 3

This is a long shot because this isn't the old twitter, but I'm looking for history articles/books that look at cases of British/Irish settlers/squatters being prosecuted for crimes against Indigenous/colonized people. It can be anywhere in the world, but ideally the late C18/early C19.

Sign please folks c.org/pcXwsDxRM4

There’s a story which may well be apocryphal: at an art exhibition in the 1880s the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin took General Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) on a tour of the gallery. There he led the general in front of his painting, “The Apotheosis of War,” (1871).

I prefer this place to the other one, but I don't have many followers here yet. Help me with the odd share if you like what I do. Ta.

Lee Miller: 'Nurse Gertrude van Kirk (of New Jersey) helps a litter case to England.' St Laurent-sur-Mer airstrip, Normandy (now site of Normandy American Cemetery), 1944. Published in US Vogue, 15 September 1944 #InternationalNursesDay Source: images.leemiller.co.uk/media/Nurse-...

I’ve just listened to the In Our Time on A Room of One's Own and was happily surprised when Hermione Lee singled this out as her favourite paragraph, ending the broadcast portion with the same words: ‘All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded'.

Nurse Ellis, Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, in the operating theatre of 62nd General Hospital, Tobruk, Libya, 1942. Her patient received multiple injuries when his truck drove over a landmine. Photo: Cecil Beaton #internationalnursesday Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

Birth of a meme. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

‘All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded…’ I’m channelling Virginia Woolf this morning into my slow reconstruction of a forgotten and unhappy life.

Children's race, Royal Engineer Signals Wireless Sports, GHQ (Montreuil, France), 12 May 1917. Photograph by unnamed Royal Engineer. #OTD #WW1 Source: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...