Life of luxury

My book is out a week today! Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Hybrid-Novel... Bookshop: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hybr... Waterstones: www.waterstones.com/book/hybrid-...

So to everyone with an interest in doom metal, the post apocalypse, and unhinged cults kicking each other to death, my tabletop game’s playtest rules, named Filth of Yersynis, have released! It’s free to access from: @yersynis_game linktr.ee/YersynisGame See you in the wasteland!

Thanks to my amazing co-editor Katie Brown, this is now with LUP for production. Bit of Work to do wit’s proofs and indexing, but hopefully out for late spring next year. Thanks as always to our amazing contributors and the @livunipress.bsky.social team.

Which party will be first to propose shooting migrants? bashing down doors and throwing them off cliffs? Taking away their status as human beings? Enslaving them? Using them as a protein source? rendering them to extract their basic mineral components? gassing them? Burning them all?

Bloody genocide opposer! What does she expect! Incredible, she thinks she can just stroll around condemning ethnic cleansing and mass murder and get away with it? Not on my watch. She's donating royalties to help the victims of genocide and expects no punishment. Crazy.

All UK HE news talks of contraction. Bronze TEF providers will be defunded. Research funding is to be more "targeted". Total continuation of the Conservatives' vision for HE, under Labour.

My interview with David Szalay is now out in @englishstudies.bsky.social. We discussed his latest novel, Flesh (since longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize); his explorations of migration and masculinity; and the affective and neurological dimensions of his style. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/2 ‘The convention, adopted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany in the second world war, defines genocide as crimes committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. ‘ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

To help news outlets: Israel's continued military action in Gaza was launched in response to the attack by Hamas militants on 7 October 2023 'which itself was a response to decades of brutal oppression, starvation, kidnap, and torture of a state under occupation and fighting settler colonialism'.

Surprise - Israel is officially committing genocide. Israel as always says that to call it's endless slaughter of women and children genocide is antisemitic. It's not antisemitic to oppose the deliberate starvation of babies. It's not antisemitic to oppose the eradication of a people and its future.

Kirk was the best evidence that you can’t win an argument with an idiot. Dumb as mud but a narcissist. Denied the existence of Palestine, of Palestinians, of genocide, advocated gun ownership, he was racist, bigoted, misogynistic. Death does not beatify.

This morning’s whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy by civility-obsessed liberals isn’t just offensive to anyone targeted by Kirk (ask anyone on the ‘professor watchlist’) but dangerous. 1/2

Very excited to get to grips with this for a review for English Studies. She’s a great Ishiguro scholar and this subject has not received such detailed analysis to date.

Are you young, highly educated and driven, and want to contribute to our stagnant economy with its aging population and low productivity? Well out you go

Eureka Masters of Cinema have released a 4K UHD of Claire Denis's horror Trouble Every Day. Includes a 50 page booklet of new essays from Amy C Chambers, Laura Mee, and a long introduction by me. Fun to write in this different format and great to be part of this. eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/troubl...

Love Oxford - week without rain it’s a dust bowl, one day of rain and roads are closed for flooding.

I can say without reservation that this is groundbreaking work that extends the remit of the gothic and its global relevance in the contemporary.

Lots of people criticise Buckingham for its stance on free speech and its politics. But I’m proud to be at an institution where I can say publicly and professionally that ‘Israel is committing genocide’ without fear of censure. I can only assume that’s why so many of you are silent.

Israel destroying hospitals and Killing journalists again. Bloodthirsty brutal nation. Eventually it’ll run out of Palestinian children to starve and murder of course and will have to look further afield to satiate its decades long appetite for child murder. Who is next?

Hero

We’ll see a growing backlash to prestige unis when they deliver teaching in massive groups or stream lectures via underpaid temporary staff and advocate for the use of AI in planning and marking to reduce contracted staff hours. We will see waves of zero hour contracts and precarity for non faculty.

We’ll see a growing backlash to prestige unis when they deliver teaching in massive groups or stream lectures via underpaid temporary staff and advocate for the use of AI in planning and marking to reduce contracted staff hours. We will see waves of zero hour contracts and precarity for non faculty.

Selecting universities are now all recruiting universities. There’s no elite anymore with the exception of the top tier RG. Go to a mid rank RG and be one of 200 per year in small seminar groups of 30. Enjoy the prestige of having to bus to campus from a satellite accommodation hub.

An independent international organisation declares the severest level of famine in Gaza and remarkably says it will inevitably get worse. The Israeli holocaust machine’s response: there’s no famine in Gaza. Aid weaponised. Food weaponised. Children murdered by bombs and starvation. Genocide.

Please help. Please sign. I work on a part-time degree for mature students to study for a BA in English Literature & Community Engagement. Its direct access and designed for those who didn't or couldn't go to Uni at 18. Bristol plan to close it. We want to save it. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Keep trying to like Hollinghurst but my god he’s so middle class, so Oxbridge. All these brilliant young people saturated in their various privileges. Hard to find a way in. Yes I know he’s a great writer but posh posh posh.

I taught for several years on this wonderful programme started by Tom Sperlinger. It is unique, and provides an opportunity for those who missed the chance in earlier years to enjoy University. One student produced the best essay I’ve read on The Atrocity Exhibition. What a loss this would be.

Anyone know how to help an abandoned cat (in Oxford)? We have several so can take no more, but a very young cat now lives essentially either in our hedge or back step. We feed it twice a day, and it never leaves. Super thin, clearly not loved, but we cannot keep another in our house.

1 in 3 doctors were born overseas. 1 in 5 university academics were born overseas. 1 in 7 UK business founders were born overseas. 1 in 2 builders were born overseas. 1 in 5 nurses were born overseas. 1 in 4 transport workers were born overseas. The media, their framing, IS the problem

Can’t wait to see the Usual Suspect RGs gorging themselves this year on too many students and starving their local post-92s into mass redundancies and course closures. Entry tarifs? Who cares! Bloated programmes without adequate facilities but the ‘prestige’ of a name. Terminal for many this year.

Two peer reviews completed this morning and happy to say one very minor revisions the other accept as is. Always a joy to read new work in the field and to get a peek at what is on the horizon.

is any industry more greedy and rapacious than veterinary practices? No interest at all in the wellbeing of animals, just money money money. Everything, even the smallest piece if information, is monetised.

Israel is starving Palestinians to death. Israel is assassinating journalists in Gaza with impunity. Israel openly plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Israel is openly planning concentration camps in Gaza. Israel kidnaps and targets doctors in Gaza.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Poem of the day: Mist by the marvellous Alice Oswald who was arrested yesterday in the Palestine protests. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Can’t wait to see the Usual Suspect RGs gorging themselves this year on too many students and starving their local post-92s into mass redundancies and course closures. Entry tarifs? Who cares! Bloated programmes without adequate facilities but the ‘prestige’ of a name. Terminal for many this year.

See Netanyahu eying up the Sudetenland. Drooling.

Thousands of Palestinian babies starving to death? Not a problem. One Israeli hostage malnourished? OUTRAGE! Why? Because an Israeli is a person and a Palestinian is not, and we don’t even recognise the existence of the land or the people we colonised to settle Israelis. What a world.

Remembering why I left Bluesky. Twitter at its best put useful things together and even those with few followers were visible. Here, it’s all little cliques. Not sure why but it feels barren and uninspiring. The same few voices and nothing new or exciting.

Coming next year, co-edited with Katie Brown (Exeter). Some incredible new essays in here, wide ranging and full of new insights. Great cover art from Miream Salameh who I also worked with for From Rupture to Refuge.

"The Israelis don't want us to film out of the window at the devastation inside Gaza. But I've spent 10 mins looking at it with my own eyes and I can tell you communities in the north of Gaza, that I knew well, are flat. There's nothing left of them." Jeremy Bowen www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

An open letter has been launched today (27/7/25) for members of the UK academic community (academics and other university staff) to sign, to press the UK Home Office to facilitate safe passage out of Gaza for 40+ students with offers for UK universities. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Last night I scored over 239 million on Hungry Shark Evolution. I had no idea it was even possible, my previous best was 27 million. Just played it cool, didn't panic when I was low on energy. Enzo was of course very impressed but also a little envious.

6 days until the deadline for abstracts!

"Kilometres away from the bombardment and starvation are supermarkets, shopping centres and people with access to unlimited food. At the viewing point in Sderot there is a vending machine dispensing water and fizzy drinks"

My latest, from the Israel-Gaza border, where I listened in as tour groups came to view the ruins of Gaza: www.irishtimes.com/world/middle...

I can only imagine how many people are applying to every even remotely academic post with the rapid dismantling of the UK HE environment begun under the Tories and accelerated by Labour. No new hires. No replacement hires. Increasing workloads for all currently employed, more pressure less time.

Try to imagine any other context where a news presenter describes credible reports that soldiers have been shooting huge numbers of teenagers and children *for sport*, for fun, and a politician gives this reaction.