'A guide told the Guardian he had spotted a “strange” gathering outside the David Hume mausoleum on 16 January at 10pm when the cemetery gates were locked. He claimed four men in long white robes were kneeling by the mausoleum and lighting candles.' www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Forgive me for tootling a small trumpet - stuff from the past, reappearing on your radio ...

Kim Jong-un inspected parts of the future monument and museum dedicated to the memory of DPRK soldiers who died fighting against Ukraine.

Excited to be chatting all things espionage and fiction with bestselling former CIA analyst David McCloskey later this month - Waterstones Deansgate, Manchester, January 28 - focussing on his new novel THE PERSIAN - www.waterstones.com/events/an-ev...

I'm enjoying this 'pubs that changed me' series in @theguardian.com Feels a good angle on life and lives www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

When I was a teenager out and about in central London there used to be a man selling poems in the middle of Hungerford Bridge. They were in coloured envelopes, laid out on a blanket. Always bought some, seemed too magical not to. Anyway, a few days ago I came across him by Tate Modern (1/2)

Slide from a lecture on post-colonialism. It's never less than mind-boggling

Thinking a lot about this moment from literally the first chapter of "1984."

Want to understand what actually went wrong at the BBC? Read Daniel Trilling’s in-depth report in the corporations’s spectacular failure over the war in Gaza. www.equator.org/articles/ins...

Exciting opportunity for writers from working-class backgrounds

I got the idea for The Shame Archive when a friend started telling me about Epstein's potential links to intelligence services. The novel's gone down to 99p on Kindle this month. www.amazon.co.uk/Shame-Archiv...

Leonora Carrington, British-Mexican (1917-2011), The Saints of Hampstead Heath, 1997, oil and gold leaf on canvasboard, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, private collection

Got to say, Polanski understands how you bring the fight

One irony of all this is that South Korea (until now) had a lot of pro-Trump love, central to its big pro-US right wing

This podcast makes a strong case for how central AI is to both ICE and Gaza - predictive models giving authority to arrests and killings therealnews.com/trump-silico...

Sharing this on the occasion of Constance Martens and Mark Gordon's sentencing - a brilliant, very deep, very long read on the couple and their trials from Clair Wills in the LRB (which may be accessible without a subscription) - www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Was surprised to find a section of the Berlin Wall currently on display in Lewisham Shopping Centre

The Eulogy I did not Give by Bob Hicok, from the New Yorker

If I had money to invest, I'd invest in the past

Re the Rooney row: How would someone donate money to Palestine Action if they wanted to?

Enjoyed learning about the history of the Salvation Army while using their cafe in Denmark Hill, but my attention was very much stolen by The Skeleton Army, their hedonistic 19th c foes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeleto...

@primitiveknot.bsky.social Saw this in Camberwell. Zine called Weird Walk.

Saturday reading

Enjoying this picture of me at work by the 5-year-old. Medieval scriptorium vibes.

This was amazing

Next week - This new event features Centre for Place Writing associates @oliharris.bsky.social (crime writer & Snr Lecturer in Creative Writing) and Rachel Genn (novelist & Snr Lecturer in Creative Writing) as well as Leone Betts & Emma Bradley. #AI #event #BookSky #Writers #Writing

We don’t know how lucky we are to have a country with so much immigration. Just spent 2 years in South Korea, which is great but relatively homogenous – often narrow, culturally, in a way that S Koreans themselves find oppressive. Immigration means freedom; it creates a deep diversity... 1/2

FICTION WRITERS RESPOND TO AI The Centre for Fiction research group - online panel discussion on the implications of AI for writers & readers of fiction. Threat or opportunity? Can AI write our books, or is there something humans can do that AI never can? Join them online on Thursday 22 May 5-6pm

It's amazing how much of the world you can come to understand through the prism of male pattern hair loss.

Interesting. So some of those sent to El Salvador without due process were about to stand trial in the US where they may have revealed dirty secrets about... the authorities in El Salvador. Convenient. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

That's a thought-provoking potential scenario: area of DMZ becomes unsecured because of wildfire

May be offline for a while

🔑 under-discussed point — why they were on signal:

Found this map for a talk I gave yesterday to students - all the US military/intel facilities in the UK. Courtesy of good old CND cnduk.org/wp-content/u...

A huge amount of intel data on this conflict will come from radar on RAF bases in the UK operated jointly by GCHQ and NSA. So who does that belong to?

Idea for a speculative thriller? US at war with UK www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Early experiments from my Sliced Poems series.

Gas-powered foghorn on the Ailsa Craig in 1886. Ailsa Craig had two foghorns, one at the north end (pictured) and one at the south end of the island. The foghorns were decommissioned in 1966.

Britain had its own small version of the USAID withdrawal when it drastically cut funding for the BBC world service. Almost all its old frequencies across the globe are now used by Russian or Chinese broadcasters.

Paperback (and audio) publication day for The Shame Archive. What happens when MI6's cache of misdeeds by the powerful gets leaked? All sorts of stuff, it turns out. Reviews and extracts on my website. www.oliverharris.co.uk/kane/the-sha... If you haven't had a chance to read so far, hope you enjoy.

Given that most fentanyl addiction stems from legitimately prescribed opioids is it worth trying some tariffs against the pharmaceutical industry?

Painting.