I reviewed Hu Anyan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

From Jung Chang’s Fly, Wild Swans: Oliver Twist is translated into Chinese as Orphan in the Capital of Fog

I reviewed Sarah Perry's Death of an Ordinary Man here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

Calling historians and researchers. The BBC Written Archives Centre has changed its access rules without consultation. This means an end to proper independent research into the BBC's rich history. 178 have already signed the open letter. Please join the campaign here: tinyurl.com/bbcwaccampaign

'The newsreader Tina Ritchie imagines she is reading the midnight news to King Charles, who she knows listens in bed.' Joe Moran on night as a space of fear and imagination

Oxford supervision, mid 1980s style. From Richard Flanagan's Question 7

Just added to my collection of graduation booklets (useful for recalling names of past students). No prizes for guessing why there are three for 2022 and none for 2020 and 2021

Join us! We are advertising two part-time, paid Editorial Fellowships at History Workshop in 2025-27. Our fellowships support early career historians to develop expertise in public, radical and digital history & to gain experience of working in an editorial team. www.historyworkshop....

I wonder if the Microsoft Bing algorithm feels hurt that so many people type 'Google' into its search box

I reviewed Ian Mayes's history of the Guardian here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

The Universal Turing Machine now live. Read online for free. Think about how you'd write your own. universalturingmachine.co.uk

“It’s very important history, but above all, it’s very readable and enjoyable history.” bit.ly/43yzlS9 Histories of news in the news: surviving editions of the 'Belfast News Letter', the world’s oldest, continuously published English-language daily, can now be accessed free #Skystorians

‘‘The mood over in Germany was, inevitably, distinctly more sombre. The defeated country was under military occupation by the Allies, towns and cities had been devastated by bombing, and millions were on the move - refugees in their own homeland, hungry and afraid’ Listening to the BBC on VE Day

Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up. Here is mine

I reviewed Fara Dabhoiwala's book about free speech here www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Really enjoying this new book by @jakecampbell88.bsky.social . A modern pilgrimage through the north country in the footsteps of saints and poets

The Times / Sunday Times paywall is down all weekend, so here's👇where you can read all my stuff for free, with selected highlights to follow: 🧵 www.thetimes.com/profile/john...

"universities are communities, sites of knowledge production, & of collective and collaborative problem-solving. However, they are no longer treated, funded, or indeed governed, as if they are any of these things." Dave Hitchcock on a decade of crisis. www.historyworkshop....

A truly lovely review by @joemoransblog.bsky.social of my book in the TLS (@thetls.bsky.social). www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-soc...

I reviewed Sam Wetherell's book Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain here www.the-tls.co.uk/politics-soc...

Every so often I make a poem out of the headlines to Adrian Chiles’s articles in the Guardian. This is the latest one

I wrote this piece, 'You are not an angel', as a sort of letter to my students (it's open access) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Day four of walking from London to New Zealand... www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuAR...

‘The things Chris Jefferies loved – books, music, theatre, opera, architecture, poetry – were, in the hands of the press, weapons to be used against him. They were evidence.’ @padrig.bsky.social on the ordeal of a former teacher wrongly accused of murder: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Amongst the bleak news from every which way, I'm celebrating my book coming out digitally today 🎉 Living with the Dead interrogates family histories and the way they shape our present. It's totally free to read/download academic.oup.com/book/59440?s... #skystorians #familyhistorians #genealogy

Advice for the ages, from Roger Rosenblatt’s The Story I Am:

The most beautiful word in the English language: 'Unsubscribe'

I’m always telling my students that a poem isn’t paraphraseable …

I wrote this for History Workshop Online as a companion piece for my article in the latest issue of HWJ: www.historyworkshop.org.uk/memory-emoti...

This is both an incredibly niche thing but I think it should be more of a thing. Caffè Nero subscribes to the British Newspaper Archive so it’s all free on their wifi. There. I said it.

Four years since my son wrote the best opening to a mystery novel ever written.

This is fucking excellent.

My speculative biography of my grandfather has been published in the latest issue of History Workshop Journal. Especially pleased that Bernard Canavan's sketch of my grandparents' wedding photograph is on the front cover ... academic.oup.com/hwj/article/...

The sun rising over the River Mersey on the day after the solstice. The light begins its return ...

It's my last day in the university today before we close for the Christmas break. A few years ago I wrote about the strange feels provoked by this day in the calendar joemoran.net/2017/12/22/t...

Last week, we shared our annual Radical Reads for 2024. If you're looking for something to read or listen to, check out our editors' brilliant recommendations of memoirs, novels and podcasts from the past year. And see you in the new year! 🎄 www.historyworkshop....

Hate freeloaders who join in the New Year's Eve countdown for the last 10 seconds. I've been doing this all year. Where were you back in May

Managerial blah: "without any sense of voice or audience, it feels tone-locked, written by no one in particular to be read by no one in particular. It is anti-language, a weary run-through of the verbal motions," says @joemoransblog.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/features/sco...

Includes a couple of recommendations from me ...

A poem I wrote called 'Invitation to submit'

Post the last sentence of your last article: 'All these lives are ending quietly offstage – whole universes of meaning, memory and desire, vanishing into black holes as the oxygen supply cuts off at the stem of their brains, and the world is just going endlessly, callously on.'

I still haven’t worked out what to do in this boxing ring on my own, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

I wrote this for the new open-access journal Public Humanities on how we should respond to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (and Elon Musk): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thank you all for the great suggestions of people-watching songs.

I'm writing a book about people watching. Inspired by Sam Fender's new single, 'People Watching', I wondered if anyone could think of good people-watching songs. I'm thinking of 'Penny Lane', 'Waterloo Sunset', 'Parklife', that kind of thing.

Wild Twin book event last night in the library of Liverpool’s sumptuous Athenaeum club. A wonderful conversation with author and academic Joe Moran.