** My Top Ten Photos of the Year · #10 of 10** Medieval Green Man at Norwich Cathedral. I’ve visited many places that offer a captivating glimpse into the past, but few have made me feel like the past was gazing back at me.

I was overly Northern and said “Beautiful evening isn’t it?” As I passed Melvin Bragg sitting on a bench in Hampstead.

My Substack year in review, featuring a few historical Cambridge women who really should be better known.

A lady in her eighties who lives in my building asked me if she should see Marty Supreme, or as she put it, "the one about the pisher who thinks he's a big shot," and I don't think this movie has anything to teach her that she doesn't already know.

My annual list of blog posts, articles and other internet things that I enjoyed or found especially interesting this year: thesphinxblog.com/2025/12/29/b...

I am here for the impassioned poetry nerdery of the replies

No car since September and I wondered if we'd manage getting our Yule tree this year. I broke my wrist week before last which slowed my efforts to get ours up by last Sunday (Solstice.) What a joy to jaunt on foot through crisp, wintry air with my teen. 🎄✨ Here's my hero, yesterday and every day:

This is my only Xmas poem, a carol inspired by sitting up all night to watch the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners in the 2010 Copiapó accident after 69 days in what seemed like a miracle to me as slowly the darkness gave way to dawn.

Just your annual reminder that this photo accurately reflects what Brigid Brophy thought of Christmas.

“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller) more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

“You will always be a critic, and never an author—and the world will forget that you ever even lived.” Ok, not exactly advice more a prediction – from Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women.

“Write every day”. Impractical, joyless and, above all, balls.

“Please stop sending us your manuscripts.”

‘I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries... I am content to have lived many years of my life in a college.’ (Jane Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, Hogarth Press, 1925)

Be nice to your postie at Christmas, they are doing a job you would probably find too difficult. 🙏

Ladybird Artists Advent Calendar, window 23 ‘Visits’ Artist: Ronald Lampitt (1951)

"He believed that C20th British cultural life was, to a certain extent, a conspiracy in which ordinary people found themselves repeatedly hoodwinked by gate-keeping taste-brokers with a fatal attachment to modernism." RIP Professor John Carey

Santa stone, created by Gwyneth Rowlands c.lateC20th in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital, where she was compelled to live for 30 years Her vast body of work is composed of hundreds of painted flints & found objects, inspired by her extraordinary life & knowledge of art & literature

Snape Maltings. 📷 #photography

‘That death is part of life can be a platitude, but also a deep truth difficult to grasp without experiencing it first-hand’: a novelist records her father-in-law’s last weeks

In 1944 Elizabeth Taylor told Ray Russell that she ‘had a letter from that dreadful George Orwell saying he’s keeping one of my stories & wants to print it some weeks hence in the – yes – Tribune… I wrote it before the war & it’s one of my worst.’

Driving from Durrus to Ballydehob to see for myself the family farmhouse they burned my grandmother out of a hundred years ago the hedgerow on my right gives way to intermittent flashes of the lovely spangle of the bay we leave behind A poem by Nick Laird: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The person of the year is just outside of the frame, sawing through the girder.

Great that Sylvia Townsend Warner will be a visible presence in Dorchester. I wrote about her early life here: akennedysmith.substack.com/p/sylvia-tow...

Coralie Cook, descendent of the Hemings family enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, was born enslaved in 1861. She was an advocate for women’s rights & a professor who served on DC's board of ed, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, & president of the Washington Artists Association.

Died #OTD 1784 Dr Johnson. This part-blind provincial boy who never finished university wrote the dictionary that defined the English Language. Hear his life story in our podcast: tinyurl.com/r6x2d9m7 #history #literature #english #dictionary #writer

John Carey’s gone. A great critic and a very decent man. Knock it off, would you, reaper? I spoke to him about poetry a few years back

John Carey: The last public critic

I'm in the bumper Christmas @litreview.bsky.social, talking mostly about pickles. #pickles

As a review is announced into who counts as disabled, I offer some reflections on disability and UK employment policies over the twentieth century historyandpolicy.org/policy-paper...

John Updike’s literary letters; Jane Austen at 250; irritating professors; Cixin Liu’s stories of wonderment; beer as object and metaphor; our annual Christmas quiz – and much more. The new TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

David Warren has won the Biographers’ Club Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize for his proposal Sir Ernest Satow: A Victorian Diplomat and the Birth of Modern Japan 👇 #BookSky

'The sculptor’s bad luck continued when in 1909 he was chosen to memorialise another towering figure in British history, former prime minister and “Grand Old Man” of politics William Gladstone.' A lovely post on epic sculpture and bad timing, by @frankie49.bsky.social.

This quote by Rupert Brooke about his sexuality appears EVERYWHERE but I am struggling to pin down where he wrote it. I assume a letter but I can’t lay my hands on it in Keynes’s 1968 edition of his letters. Anyone know?

'I have been reading your work since I was at school,' the aspiring novelist Elizabeth Taylor told Virginia Woolf in 1932, 'and it has always helped me to have an unmuddled attitude to life, to see the vividness and importance of every minute, the significance of every action.’

I think this early shot of O'Connell Bridge in Dublin is my favourite Martin Parr photo. All the artistry and all the comic love of the absurdity of everyday life is here.

Devastated at the loss of Martin Parr, one of the greatest photographers of our time & a peerless champion of photography. I commissioned him @bodleian.ox.ac.uk to document @ox.ac.uk which became an exhibition & photobook, & he came to open our Paddy Summerfield show just a few weeks ago. RIP Martin

Linguists start compiling first ever complete dictionary of ancient Celtic www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Martin Parr, photographer acclaimed for observations of British life, dies aged 73. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

In The Observer, I’ve reviewed Songs Of Seven Dials: @tricksterprince.bsky.social’s fascinating, detailed history of the changing streets of Covent Garden through the early c20th. From race to jingoistic media to gentrification, a book full of resonances today observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Celebrate St. Nicholas Day with one of my favourite @ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social paintings, St Nicholas of Bari banishing the Storm [Bicci di Lorenzo (1373–1452)]

Newly announced, Arvon's programme of day time online retreats - a whole month worth of Thursday's in March will bring @mailbykite.bsky.social & I into your writing room - bringing support, guidance & workshops for your wip or something new @arvonfoundation.bsky.social www.arvon.org/writing-cour...

Congratulations once again to the six shortlisted authors for the 2025 #WolfsonHistoryPrize. 📕Eleanor Barraclough 📕Helen Castor 📕 @kieranconnell.bsky.social 📕Hannah Durkin 📕Andrew Fleming 📕 @victoriandetective.bsky.social www.wolfsonhistoryprize.org.uk/past-winners...

Black Friday bargain for my double biography of Gwen and Augustus John - Artists Siblings Visionaries nearly half price on Amazon....

My latest post, featuring Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Amy Levy, with critics' Books of the Year (including Economica by @vnbateman.bsky.social), new words in dictionaries and old letters in secondhand books (see @sarahjlonsdale.bsky.social) akennedysmith.substack.com/p/love-lette...

A stunning portrait of the Scottish classical architect Sir William Bruce (c. 1630-1710) & his sexy cravat, painted in the 1660s by John Michael Wright. Bruce remodelled parts of the Palace of Holyroodhouse & designed Hopetoun House. Portrait spotted at the National Gallery of Scotland last weekend.

Grief created by Joan Wisdom, November 1967, in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital, Surrey where she was compelled to live. Her surviving works express distress & critique the psychiatric system which held power over her & the dehumanisation she experienced within it

More rain today. 🖼️ Freya Hartas