A fantastic-and better yet-Open access book by Susanna Elm : www.ucpress.edu/books/the-im...

Home Office Ministers state publicly, on the record, that they are deliberately making life worse for older people and people with disabilities who depend on care services, but it's worth it because it reduces net migration.

They should invent a university that prioritizes teaching and research

Playing 6000-year-old conch shell trumpets for the first time reveals they were effective tools for long-distance communication and may have also been used as musical instruments 🐚 Read the research 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

This is a late ancient (5-7th c.?) Greek account of the life of a rich woman who was raised Jewish, converted to Christianity when her parents died, lived for 20 years as a male monk named John, was discovered & made head of a woman's monastery, & was later martyred

No, I love this, the mismatch between 'how the fuck up happened'* and 'the experience of the person they've got to investigate it', it's like if a secondary school hired Arsene Wenger to be a PE teacher. *They hit 'upload' when they really shouldn't, 9/10.

A lovely story of an archivist reaching out for religious community support to fully understand a holy book in the collection, and that community getting a wonderful experience in return. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Farage doesn't even have to turn up to dominate the House of Commons. thecritic.co.uk/livi...

This is a good point - even if you are to grant Labour benefit of the doubt on strategy (generous move right now) - last week's strategy was "we are too weak to do thing which annoys some MPs" (break manifesto pledge), this week's is "we must do even more difficult thing which annoys more MPs more"

This weeks sees the 2025 A. G. Leventis Conference - 'Telling Bodies: A Conference on Corporeal Classical Reception'. Find confirmed speakers and details of related events - including the launch of the A.G. Leventis Centre for Greek Studies - at edin.ac/427jxo9 #Classics #HCA #Leventis #Edinburgh

The BBC has consistently platformed Matt Goodwin because of his racist views and the veneer of respectability brought by his past life as an academic.

NEW from me: Political hostility, high visa fees and (in the case of the UK) stagnant incomes are making the UK and US less attractive destinations for top international talent. That steep decline in the appeal of moving to the US after 2016 is 👀

Reposting because this ought to get more views.

geo/chrono specialization open, but ad flags "expertise in the Roman Imperial or late antique periods" & notes "preference will be given to scholars whose work engages with the diversity and complexity of the Mediterranean world in such areas as ethnicity, gender, environment, or connectivity"

This is a lie. There are many criticisms you might sensibly and truthfully make of the Sentencing Council and the Sentencing Guidelines. I’ve been making them for years. But this is an outright lie. Pure fabrication. A fraud on the public.

The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies is hiring three postdoctoral researchers. We investigate the causes and mechanisms that contribute to the persistence of strong asymmetrical dependencies across historical and contemporary contexts. Pre-modern perspectives are very welcome!

fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck OFF with this bullshit

We had an entire day of stimulating discussions yesterday at the 'Elite Women and Systems of Dependency in Late Antiquity' workshop organised by Grace Stafford and yours truly. We are grateful to @dependencybonn.de for providing funding and assistance for this event.

Today is the day! Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination is now widely available. I will be giving my first book talk at the University of Pittsburgh, with a specific focus on domestic violence. press.edu/books/gender-violence-in-late-antiquity/hardcover

Most humanities research — including the best, most world leading research by people we’ve all heard of — is unfunded, by which they mean produced as part of one’s routine job as a university lecturer, just “not funded by a big competitive external grant”. This would mean the death of research.

OK, it's not from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's brilliant oeuvre but it's still absolutely fascinating! From "Bears: Will Be Boys: A data analysis of animal gender in children’s books" pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

NEW from me today... In case you missed it earlier, I'm in the @politicalquarterly.bsky.social asking 'Where Next For Britain's Universities?' The answer: a very long and grim retreat. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Letter of the day (in the Times)

Calls for a "huge nationwide wave" of protests in last 48 hours saw about 300 people attend one locally-organised protest in Nuneaton (serious charges in local case) + 19 protests range from 6 peoole (Wolverhampton) with about four more reaching 100-200 people (Altrincham,Canary Wharf) Total < 2000

Police must release ethnicity of suspects so racists know whether to burn down hotels or not, says Home Secretary. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Labour won’t stand up to this stuff, but don’t worry, they have ANOTHER policy to force additional costs onto business to make it up to you. (I am not joking.)

It is not “deal-making.” It is extortion built on Christopher Rufo’s idea of “taking down” one or more elite university. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/u...

'The number of student-initiated PhD scholarships funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is set to fall by 60 per cent when new doctoral training arrangements come into effect next year, new figures show.' 1/3

When I pointed out King’s will lose 90% of its AHRC student-led places under the new scheme, I got piled on by the AHRC Chair claiming I was wrong and scaremongering. It wasn’t quite 90%. This year King’s students got 27 AHRC student-led scholarships. Next year they’re giving us 3. So 89% then.

Jesus and the Devil, caught at a Coldplay gig

Well isn't that NICE? Remember folks, the rest of the UK university sector may be collapsing, but as long as a few of the Poors get into Oxbridge, a pair of institutions that between them educate ONE PERCENT of undergraduates, everything will be Just Fine.

we would be in a much better state in this country if we stopped focusing on anointing a chosen few working class students into Oxbridge, and instead properly funded all the different sorts of universities that attract students from a wide range of backgrounds already

New on the blog: Teaching Slavery in Late Antiquity - a reflection In a guest post, Jamie Wood (University of Lincoln) talks about his new undergraduate module on late antique slavery. We'll be publishing some of his students' work over the next few weeks. www.dosseproject.com/teaching-sla...

I'm assuming that households with foreign nationals will be able to stop paying National Insurance then? This is the most vile, and also most illogical, anti-immigration policy I've seen in a good while, and that's saying something in this climate.

It's completely insane. If introduced you'd have large numbers of families rendered destitute and local authorities would have to support them with no money available to do so.

More than a quarter of people think MPs expenses are one of the top three costs for government. A higher % than think the same for pensions or education.

My thoughts on the utter scandal of Raynor Winn and The Salt Path - are all of us memoirists liars? heawood.substack.com/p/i-cant-bel...

A very good thread. Note, it remains possible that the Courts will refuse to allow Yvette Cooper to proscribe Palestine Action. The High Court on Friday held that there was, in effect, a serious question to be asked about the lawfulness of her decision.

obviously this is mental in and of itself but man alive it really does suck extra hard when you think about all the ACTUAL CRIMES the police just isn't investigating, because of "lack of resources"

✊⚡🏆 Working Classicists Awards 2025 ✊⚡🏆 It's time to announce the winners of #WCA2025! Our six categories this year: 🎨Creative Classicist 🦸Unsung Classicist 🧑‍🏫Educator Classicist 🤝Community Classicist 🌱Newcomer Classicist and ⭐Working Classicist of the Year And our winners are...

1. One thing you need to realise about the British Establishment is that it uses clowns to express its deepest desires. People like Rod Liddle offer a kind of deniability - "lighten up, he's just having a laugh". But they deliver a closer representation of its truths than any sober editorial.

shall i publish this 800 word book review paywalled or shall i pay a mere £2663 to publish open access?

The whole McSweeney chat seems like a way to avoid enumerating Labour's strategic mistakes. I think it's important to name them: • reactionary policies harming trans people and immigrants to appease social-media-addled arseholes • spinning increased spending as cuts to appease the right-wing press

Absolutely incredible turnout for Budapest Pride! So proud of all the organizers, including some old friends, who estimate hundreds of thousands— major embarrassment to Orban

NEW from the Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine... our handlist of the 198(!!!) pre-1000 manuscripts with medical texts not included in the standard catalogues. It's been a productive first phase for the project... but a lot of work still to do! #medievalsky

Applies to all journals. Please write reviews!

In the world Labour is creating you can be as enthusiastic as you like about genocide but it will be a criminal offence to express support for Palestine Action's attempts to stop it.