What's the most radical act of optimism in UK HE in 2025/26? Buying an academic diary for 2026/27...

Well, I reckon this has been the most miserable winter (literal and figurative) since I moved to Edinburgh, but we might yet make it out of it (literal and figurative)

These AI guys are, unquestionably, scum

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

Hello! During the pandemic, I compiled a collection of digitised Great War primary sources for student research essays. Going through them just now for my current class, loads of those links are now dead. Does anyone have any favourite online source collections (that work)? Will share new list!

Is this the pinnacle of so-called performative male reading?

I saw this in the Dalgety Bay station car park earlier, and I feel like it's the perfect visual metaphor for British public infrastructure

Great to see support from @lornaslater.bsky.social for Edinburgh Napier @eisunion.bsky.social strikers. I'd point out, though, re: her post (last repost) that we've already lost over 50 staff through "targeted voluntary redundancy", as well as many more unfilled posts and ended fixed-term contracts.

Pleased to stand with @eisunion.bsky.social and meet affected staff from Napier to hear their concerns about potential job losses 👩‍🎓

I know everyone has posted this, but this isn't clunky. It's an ellipsis which is both recoverable (you can work out that what is missing is "you might", at the beginning), and generative, in that the terseness tells us something about the character.

CAIL = prerequisite knowledge for a critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims. For example, the idea that human-like systems are a sensible or possible goal is the result of circular reasoning and anthropomorphism. olivia.science/ai 🧵

In just over a month I'm contributing to a panel at the @baftss.bsky.social conference on navigating research/pedagogy as an 'independent scholar'. I strongly dislike the term 'independent' and wonder about other possible terms. Has anyone come up with a better alternative?

Yet more great evidence about how important and skilled English graduates are @univeng.bsky.social

Nicola Beauman's v.g. biography is indeed called The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Worth delving into further- I also read and enjoyed her first, At Mrs Lippincote's. Jessica Gildersleeve has an essay on Taylor and anxiety in my co-edited collection Beyond Modernism (out later this year with Bloomsbury).

I think Beci and I differ so radically in whether one might be sympathetic to Aldington's poetry that I can't respond to that assessment. But if you want to read more, Charles (he was known as Mike) Doyle's biography isn't the go-to any more. (+)

Does anyone have a list of a) books/culture journalists or b) bookstagrammers that you would contact with a news story? Posting in the hope that one of you might be able to save me a lot of time...

These are the 4 things AI can do well: •Clean up your email inbox (badly) •Give my shittiest neighbor (Alan) something to talk about at a party •Tell a 12 yr old to kill himself •Incinerate a school at 10:16 AM on a Tuesday You can see why we need to base our economy around it

This is really disgraceful. A Labour government should be ashamed of this happening on their watch. They probably won't be though.

On a train to Edinburgh that is now scheduled to terminate at Preston, pray for me

Reminder that this will mark our 10th currently scheduled strike day (there will be more as university management isn't coming back to the table with any changed position). If you're in Edinburgh it'd be great if you'd come along in support.

Birmingham's Midland Hotel hosted the Conservative MP Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 but, earlier than this, Labour's Oswald Mosley broke the Chamberlains' grip on power in 1929 before creating his new fascist party. By 1931, Birmingham people had violently driven him out of the city.

Universities pay copyright fees. Libraries pay copyright fees. Theaters pay to perform copyrighted work. Artists and authors pay licence fees to quote others in their own work, usually out of pocket.

Double header of "just fund public services" this morning: day 8 of strike over redundancies at my institution, and over 20 mins (continuing) of calling my GP to try and get an appointment.

I've got a Paul Nash calendar this year, and it felt a bit on the nose to turn over and see his great First World War painting "We Are Making a New World" as the image for March. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_...

Anyone in the Edinburgh area, come hang out and support us next Thursday?

Interesting, and begs the continuing vital, existential question: who is willing to assert education as a public good?

Hello from strike day 7 over redundancies at my institution.

Would be very welcome, but please also do university funding and staffing. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'd rather be looking at my notes and watching some of the bits from Soylent Green, which I was meant to be teaching today. Instead I'll be on strike against redundancies.

As we have repeatedly tried to explain to a government intent on punishing universities, graduate outcomes will always be poor if you underpay every sector. (Nb y axis starting at 50)

Now that only the final proofs/indexing remains, it is probably a good time to mention that my first book, Organised Militarism in Interwar Britain, is coming out in April (open access) with @uolpress.bsky.social as part of the @ihr.bsky.social / @royalhistsoc.org New Historical Perspectives series.

Are you a doctoral researcher in Arts & Humanities in Scotland? Apply to showcase your research at our 2026 Research Showcase. ✨ ✔ Up to £1000 funding ✔ Creative formats welcome ✔ Open to all PhDs at SGSAH member institutions Apply by 27th March ⏳ 🔗 Full details: www.sgsah.ac.uk/about/news/h...

Until Sunday 22 February Bloomsbury are practically giving away my newly published 'Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain', with the pb at £18.89 (plus p&p) and the .pdf or epub ebook just £14.57. www.bloomsbury.com/uk/magic-ray...

On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...

IMPORTANT pls RT My online novel seed-story.com is loading sporadically/not at all The servers belonged to Google Creative Labs Sydney (now apparently defunct) If anyone reading worked there/knows someone who did pls get in touch urgently so this pioneering work of digital literature can be saved

Just a few hours left for this, but it's plenty of time. Even just answering the "overall do you agree" question can be meaningful. Speak against this endless cruelty.

UK friends, this is the kind of utter awfulness the present UK government is proposing re immigration and rights of settlement. Please please take some time today to respond to this (link in this thread below). This cannot pass.

Meanwhile, today staff at Edinburgh Napier are on strike because of job losses, "voluntary" already enacted, and compulsory being pushed through.

Strike week at Edinburgh Napier. Our first two of 10 days of strike action happen on Tuesday and Thursday. Fighting against management's refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies. Our university has no debt, we have reserves and have already lost too many staff.

Against amnesia about the history of English literary studies, racism, and a brief note on #tolkien, occasioned by reading Collini, a thread on Sir Israel Gollancz, the first Jew appointed as a Professor of English literature in the UK. 1/ bsky.app/profile/step...

NB: The UK govt owns the Student Loans Company, via which it directly funds most home students’ university places. Framing graduates as indebted to this ‘company’ for the rest of their working lives is an accounting trick that both punishes the pursuit of education and undermines its public value.

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Meanwhile, at a school and university near you, AI tools that have yet to be tested on the types of students and subjects you teach are being rolled out to/in them without robust discussion and analysis. It's a major, shameful failing of the management of education systems.

The British Labour Party has broken with even the most basic social democratic values... There are loads of public services I don't use and some I hope never to have to use but I want them to be there for those who need or want them. You'd imagine *the Labour Party* would understand that...

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

Not the most important thing about this article, but an unusual choice of illustrative image @tennispodcast.bsky.social

I just feel like this is not the ideal thing for the Max Spielmann photo booths helpdesk to show up as in one's email inbox

I turn 50 this year. My father wasn’t born yet in 1946.

Classic beginning of term/state of things dream last night: I was at a (?semi-) derelict version of my secondary school with a group of people. We were playing a game, which was to hide a box full of copies of what we were teaching among the ruined, deserted buildings. (1/2)