Hadn’t read this phrase before. “Populism killing the future” exactly sums up why I find it so depressing that we have here in the UK a government pretending that the inflationary consequences of Trump’s war are the fault of the supermarkets, and opposition parties pretending it is the government.

Immigration make Britain brilliant

The jurists Severus, Paulus, Gaius and Hermogenianus BnF MS Latin 4404; Breviarium Alarici; 9th century (c. 803-814); Loire Valley (?); f.2r @gallicabnf.bsky.social

I see Simon Heffer, in Michael Gove's Spectator, is once again repeating his lie that Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech wasn't about race.. I debated Heffer recently (at the Oxford Litfest) - here's what I said. archive.ph/bqKZF

If you totted up the sums for every financial scandal in British politics (£2k per parliamentary question for cash-for-questions, £200k for Johnson’s No 10 renovation, the cost of that very nice campervan) even with second tier stuff like Rayner and Polanski, would you get close to £5mn *in total*?

Coincidentally, the number of staff currently at risk of redundancy (2700) at the University of Nottingham is the same as the number of jobs at risk at British Steel. Yesterday, the govt said they aren't neutral on job losses & so pledged to save those steel jobs. Watch as they blithely ignore HE.

Ideas for episode titles for a new six-part drama series about the modern university: 1. The ‘business case’ 2. ‘No decision has been made’ 3. The 'listening exercise' 4. The counter-proposal 5. ‘We’re not doing this lightly’ 6. Your email account will be deleted at midnight.

Exciting, and very wide-ranging, conference coming up in Edinburgh @hcaatedinburgh.bsky.social on "Institutional identities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages": hca.ed.ac.uk/updates-even... - very sorry to be missing it.

Wes Streeting is already facing growing calls to stand down as PM

Keir Starmer’s response is almost everything I feared, just a big list of “things have never been worse. Time to press the same buttons as yesterday”

"Scholars from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome." #MedievalSky #speirgorm #Spéirghorm www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

There’s two weeks left to apply for this position. I appreciate everyone who has shared this so far. If anyone has questions about the position, then please contact me.

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

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.