Why does my weak and pathetic cat refuse to bark and wag its tail

New 1926 General Strike map online! Using early 20th century Ordnance Survey maps, the online resource shows strike events (through archive sources) in their contemporary landscape. Explore the map, digitised sources and more at warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...

This is a free event in-person and online. Registration required.

Come on, now. It’s the same shit as ever, it’s just these guys are just too stupid to realise it would help to pretend that it isn’t.

Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride win Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of today’s pages www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

James Joyce: A Political Life by Frank Callanan is a major new #biography that reveals how politics profoundly shaped Joyce’s life, thought & writings. Out now in the UK/Europe, & available in North America on April 14. Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #JamesJoyce #Literature

This article is a pretty good sample of just how far constructionism has gone and how we have come to deny fundamentally trans-historical human nature.

I've been using AI to visualise a *lot* of data-points onto a pretty detailed map of Ireland (130 polygons) and I gotta say, it's been invaluable. It would have been impractical (for me) before now.

So, historian here looking for more freelance work over the next few months. I’m a very experienced RA and have done lots of things, including numerous oral history interviews, editing, co-authoring a book, public history journalism, archive work…

📜Chartists, Rebels & Radicals🔥 Dr Neil Pye @livunipol.bsky.social and Constantin Torve @quceh.bsky.social will explore the lasting impact of 19th century popular protest. 🗓️6pm, 29 April 🧭CTL, @liverpooluni.bsky.social FREE registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1985517033... #AcademicSky #HistSky

ICHS 2026 Symposium: Peasant Movements and Land Agitation in Modern Ireland,  Institute of Irish Studies, QUB, Saturday 11 April 2026, 9.30-4.00pm. All welcome (in-person and online). Further details and registration👇

The Iranian government are a bad bunch but if they don’t do this, they all get killed, their military gets destroyed to the foundations and their country gets broken up into an ungovernable mess. And it’s not like neither Reed nor Phillips understand that this is so. They get it just fine.

It's blindingly obvious that a return to sit-down exams is the only response to AI. I don't understand why the switch hasn't been immediate and universal.

John Pentland Mahaffy tries to persaude the young Shane Leslie NOT to go to Oxford and go to Trinity Dublin instead (he went up to Cambridge).

It’s been out a while now, but Rosemary Sweet and I have written a book about #18thcentury British travel to Spain and Portugal that is free to download here! uclpress.co.uk/book/no-coun...

I finished prepping my Famine paper today. It felt *furious* as I was writing it, but ironic and detached when I read it out loud to myself. I guess I'll find out how it carries tomorrow! ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

"Trafalgar Square is for all of us", vomits the repellent Nick Timothy, implying special treatment for Muslims. The facts:

a refugee and genocide survivor is about to start her Master's at Goldsmith and this is the response from a senior politician. what a disgrace.

Yeah, I think that this is pretty much like the “Russia got Trump elected” stuff: even if it’s true, that’s only because you’ve made a system so fragile, so insane, that it could be pushed over into disaster with one pinky finger, and the blame for that lies inside America and not abroad.

How are we enjoying Year 8 of “what happens if we let fash crackpots decide what is and isn’t poisonously racist”? The results are much as you’d expect: nothing and nobody is racist except for the hated Left and the Guardian, which is the most repellently bigoted and hateful publication in Britain.

It's good to be reminded that the 'social invention of human nature' idea, though unfortunately it was taken up by Marxisants, PoMos and rad-libs (via outright reactionaries like Philippe Ariès) was always a counter-Enlightenment historicism and always tendentially far-right ultra-elitism.

Just finished the stuff on the Famine in Marc's massive book on the peasantry yesterday. This will be great stuff wordwellbooks.com/index.php?ro...

I'll be talking about the Great Famine in Old London Town this Thursday. Come along, say hello! ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Bought this in Oxfam, which is good. Pristine, but spine cracks and pages shed when you open it. Any advice?

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, I'd have thought. But no doubt I'm missing something.

Defensive strikes, I assume

Palantir is such a great fit for the NHS.

On Sat 11 April we will be hosting, in association with @irishhistorians.bsky.social, a day symposium on 'Peasant Movements and Land Agitation in Modern Ireland'. This is a free event, open to all in-person or online via Teams. More info at www.qub.ac.uk/schools/Iris... #IrishStudies

Very excited to get up and running with this one: awarded £1.5m AHRC Standard Grant for Landscapes of Catastrophe, a project examining the context and impact of the Great Irish Famine www.qub.ac.uk/schools/NBE/...

Looking forward to contributing to Clare Museum‘s series of talks this Wednesday with a presentation on threatening letters - claremuseum.ie/events/clare...

Bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure to have major environmental fallout, experts warn

".. this is the realities of war, & those who target civilians, in particular the Iranian regime, that kind of action is appalling" Govt minister Sarah Sackman on the bombing of the school in Minab, which more & more people are now admitting was done by the US

Former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams has arrived at the High Court in London where a legal action which claims he was a senior member of the IRA is due to get under way.

Used reading week to finally finish this excellent book: Colleen Taylor’s Irish Materialisms: The non-human and the making of colonial Ireland, 1690-1830. it uses coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud and pigs(!) to think about material lives of Irish peasants

there are like 50 people in the country who want the UK to get involved in the Iran War, one of them is Kemi Badenoch, one of them is Nigel Farage, and the other 48 are newspaper columnists

Inspiring as this no doubt is, I again ask: what did Sir Keir mean when he said the lads at this base had done loads of good work that he couldn’t talk about, a couple of hundred miles from the Gaza Strip

I'll be speaking at this. Thought my book was maybe moderately iconoclastic but I see I'm outdone by the bould Sean Connolly. www.qub.ac.uk/events/whats...

the amount of Islamophobic content they've managed to generate out of a historically left-wing constituency voting for a left-wing MP is astonishing

My general inclination is to be sanguine about things. But it does increasingly feel now that the lamps are going out all over the West; and that we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

An extra ordinary resource for historians of eighteenth century Ireland as well as economic and social historians more generally @eshsi.bsky.social

In the latest Urban History interview, @erikahanna.bsky.social speaks to @samgrinsell.bsky.social about his recent article 'Urban History as Urgent Work'. It's an incredibly rich discussion of the intersection of urban history and environmental history, and how we do and communicate our research

Governments and public figures across the white people world cannot now speak plainly about what the Trumpers are and what they’ve done, without serious self-incrimination. Sullen acceptance path of least resistance. In for a penny, in for a pound: one day this will all be over, and so on.

Francis Edgeworth died 100 years ago on 13 February 1926. I gave a little paper about him at a very jolly event held in Oxford to mark the occasion, available here: www.sciencespo.fr/department-e... #EconSky #econhist

Iran has said it has no intention of negotiating with the United States and was ready for a long-haul war | Follow live developments

Straight up racism. The GB press really is a sewer.

In order to understand UK politics in 2026 you must realise that a plumber & plasterer doesn't represent the interests of the working class because she is left-wing but a wealthy broadcaster & former academic does represent the interests of the working class because he is right-wing. Hope this helps

Ireland's libraries are the best! Love this @irishtimes.com piece by @rositaboland.bsky.social about the #CorkCountyCouncil mobile library on the Beara Peninsula ❤️📚🚌 www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

IGRS Top Research Tip #196: Were any of your ancestors part of the 17th century plantation of Ulster? The Ulster Settlers Database brings together a variety of surviving sources which identify many of the early settlers: ulster-settlers.maynoothuniversity.ie

The last time a New Rome death-grappled with its old Persian nemesis, Islam swept up the middle and conquered much of the known world. Never can tell where these things end.

It should go without saying that the aim here is to collapse Iran - a country of ninety million people - into ungovernable chaos and Mad Max-style warlord catastrophe, much as they have every other country from Libya to Afghanistan that they could not buy off.