Top 5 film genres: • French noir • French melodrama • French romance • French spoof • French crime

Thanks data leaks. Without my card now for 6-8 working days because of fraud.

Yes, perfectly normal to want a manifesto pledge to make people eat Turkey at Christmas.

At some point, for the love of God, will someone ANYONE at long last take the council funding crisis seriously?!? Because THIS is what will break down a society, not some poor soul escaping incredible dangers, arriving on our shores.

Archives preserve history, and history is the only way we have to understand HOW WE FUCKING GOT WHERE WE ARE NOW.

Thousands hit streets of Belém to call for action during crucial Cop30 summit

“The same communities shaped by slavery, colonial extraction, and racialised policies are now on the frontline of climate disaster”

'Don’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis' www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

Concentrated wealth is antisocial and against human good. Anti-knowledge of the far right and their wealthy champions is screwing us and will destroy us unless people - bodily - step up to oppose these forces. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Marketing Departments many a library worker resigns themselves to living with.

It takes an obscene amount of hubris to lecture the BBC when you have The Telegraph’s record on truth-telling. Some of the paper’s errors this year are so bad they’re almost laughable 👇🏻

God. I was *obsessed* with the ‘Caveman’ game - stealing eggs from the dinosaur and chucking axes at the pterodactyl 😀 The ‘Demon Driver’ crash sound was alarming - can still hear it. ‘Missile Invader’ sounds must have inspired Aphex Twin?!

Age yourself with gaming

In the British Library autumn 2025. Full support to @pcsunion.bsky.social union members fighting for better pay & respect at work wp.me/p15p2Q-ftH

“I did a word-cloud!” (*said in my best toddler’s voice*)

A post on keeping old blog posts alive, following the news that the British Library is having to come up with a solution for all of its past blogs, following the collapse of the Typepad platform lukemckernan.com/2025/11/11/k...

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print. ✍️ Mathew Lyons explains www.historytoday.com/archive/mont...

Never truer. Fuck off (Trump’s) America!! 51st State of America … youtu.be/bSTOT-zQ-MU?...

If BBC News was a hotbed of left-wing wokery producing *systemically* biased coverage Jeremy Corbyn may well have been elected Prime Minister in 2019. It’s not. He wasn’t. And we got Boris Johnson instead.

Dear Britain: Your polls look very "European" and NOW would be a really really really really really really really good time to switch to PR. ➡️ RFM: 26% | 170 (+74) 🟥 LAB: 19% | 124 (-110) 🟦 CON: 18% | 118 (-38) 🟩 GRN: 15% | 98 (+55) 🟧 LDM: 14% | 91 (+10) 🟨 SNP: 3% | 19 (+2) 🔲 PLC: 2% | 12 (+7)

Does Britain value culture any more? Ask the striking workers at the British Library (edited transcript of a speech given on the picket line outside the British Library on Friday 7th November) Zadie Smith’s script should be archived @britishlibrary.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What is the Black Archive? Reparations and Transformation Sat, 29 Nov, British Library On Presenting the Past: Black Archives in Britain Today – GPI Archivist will be talking at this first discussion of the day, along with the BFI and the Stuart Hall Archive See British Library website to book

Crispy fried okra! #okra #crispyfriedokra #itswhatsfordinner

Great look into the comprehensiveness of EEBO and EEBO-TCP and what that means for using those tools. Highly recommend for all computational bibliographers and early modernists doing large-scale work with EEBO

The private company Restore Trust’s attempt to take over the @nationaltrust.org.uk failed again. Will they stop now? No, because they are part of the well-funded nexus of right wing activist organisations that’s determined to control national institutions. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...

I will be referring to this ‘work’ in a book history talk next week … bibsoc.org.uk/event/panel-...

Shameful. This is just up the road from me. The same people who moan about youngsters hanging out in semi-abandoned town centres, outside KFC (where there is free WiFi) are the same kind who bleat about tax, socialism, inclusivity, art, disability, social care, refugees and migrants … So here we are

#Onthisday in 1918, just days before end of #WW1, French poet Apollinaire (weakened by a shrapnel wound) died in the Spanish flu epidemic. Later that year Calligrammes: Poems of Peace & War was published, a collection of his concrete/visual poems publicdomainreview.org/collection/a... #OTD

The idea that there's a "deference to youth" is almost funny. Almost the entirety of UK politics centres around catering to boomer sensibilities.

What else can I conclude from this if not that the so-called Heritage Foundation hates black people?

“This Alternative Defence Review challenges the dominant war narrative—cultivated by political elites, the military-industrial complex, and the mainstream media—and offers a new vision for peace, justice, and security.” Sorely needed - vital, in fact.

“The resource over which they hold custody is of great worth to the country …Would Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi and George Orwell, all erstwhile users of the British Library, have produced their masterpieces without this resource?” Imperilled culture - it really is. Such negligence.

Denmark steals possessions of people seeking asylum, as policy. It returns people to situations where they are killed. Mahmood is copying some of the worst policies going. Labour once again showing it's just another anti-asylum, anti-human rights, government. #r4today www.bbc.com/news/article...

The #British Library is an essential part of maintaining #British culture and heritage. It is in the heart of London and its workers need a pay increase not a pay cut.

It was another inspiring day of the @BritLibraryPCS strike for fair pay with dozens on the picket line and incredible speakers including renowned novelist Zadie Smith, actor Ayvianna Snow, and PCS President Martin Cavanagh! Thanks everyone for your amazing support! #PCSonStrike

Solidarity with British Library staff on strike ✊

There has been wonderful support and solidarity for Library workers on the picket line these past two weeks. Today, the writer, Zadie Smith, read out her thoughts about the dispute, the Library, the country, its culture and heritage. Her values, ‘arguments’ and solidarity mean the world to me. 🙏👊🖤♥️

This explains why British Library staff are on strike The union says - managers take home up to £170k with £15k bonuses, while staff offered below-inflation pay rise Meanwhile, frontline staff take abuse for the massive data breach - which managers failed to foresee @pcsunion.bsky.social

“And you stole my gaze From the mouth of the grave It's a long walk to nothing” This by Drink the Sea is immense. A group of musicians with links to Mark Lanegan (R.I.P.), they are keeping his spirit alive. Duke Garwood is such a great guitarist and singer, makes me shiver. youtu.be/YXS_YZanF3U?...

262 prisoners released in error in the year to March 2025. I don't remember the almost daily headlines every time it happened...... why is it only the "foreign" ones are newsworthy. Also "on the run'" is stretching the truth when they've literally been kicked out by the authorities

PCS members are over halfway through their 2-week strike against low pay at the British Library, support them by using our e-action to call on MPs to demand increased grant in aid funding for the library and stand up for fair treatment. #BritishLibraryOnStrike www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

Thousands of volunteers are racing to preserve America’s history — photographing museum exhibits they fear the Trump administration could erase.

I like to think if this had been an event about Prog Rock it would have gone ahead and thus proving my ‘argument’ about Prog Rock, i.e. thank fuck for Punk!

*this* is what solidarity looks like! Thank you!! 🙏👊🖤

Decolonisation and knowledges of decolonisation produced outside academia supersede the fraction of knowledge pooled in by academia on the topic. This realisation, not a hindrance in the labour of epistemic decolonisation, invites us to engage other formations of knowledge.

The field wouldn‘t be what it is today if marginalised people hadn’t fought for their history, and in fighting developed new methods, knowledge, perspectives. There is a reason one of our best journals is called @historyworkshop.org.uk (in German @werkstattgeschichte.openbiblio.social.ap.brid.gy)

I‘m often confronted with the argument that history should be „objective“ as an academic field and distinguish itself from „activism“, and my go-to answer is: all major renewals and inspirations for new approaches in history (including those of the person asking) came from outside activism.

Unsustainable and morally indefensible.

Do punks cross picket lines ..? I guess we’ll find out this week … events.bl.uk/events/punk-...