Denmark Hill station rules!

So pleased to be starting this new project on royalist exiles in Paris attached to Queen Henrietta Maria's court, 1644-60. Thank you @britishacademy.bsky.social for funding this research! @openuniversity.bsky.social

Exciting Thursday… my book manuscript is complete and SENT 🥂⚒️

'new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.' futurism.com/future-socie...

OK but how many have you read of this Best Novels list compiled in 1898? (27 in my case) www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-...

Next month (20 June), #Colchester Choral Society performs G&S's Iolanthe. I'm singing Strephon, a fairy from the waste up and mortal from the waste down. He's in love with a shepherdess, ward to a Lord. Parliament gets involved. It's a riot. Come along! colchesterchoralsociety.co.uk/etn/gilbert-...

This marking period has been the most depressing I’ve known in 10 years in the job. A thousand curses on the people who invented this tech, and on the enablers and normalisers who push it.

Thurs May 7th, 3pm-8pm, at Birkbeck: ‘Writing Town and Village in Seventeenth-Century England’, with Niall Allsop, Judith Hudson, Ed Legon, Grace Marshall, Abigail Williams, plus Erica Fudge on ‘Fed on Scraps: Fed on Scraps: Bits of Animals in the Early Modern Archive’: www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event...

This marking period has been the most depressing I’ve known in 10 years in the job. A thousand curses on the people who invented this tech, and on the enablers and normalisers who push it.

If you’re an academic and you use generative AI in your writing I have zero respect for you. If u tell me this I am not nodding or being sanctimonious I am throwing up

When I began my editing career, I often changed “utilize” to “use.” For the past eight years or so, I’ve been changing “leverage” to “use.” Now I’m changing “use case” to the noun “use.” What do you people have against “use” in its various forms? It’s a perfectly fine word.

Back to the joys of lecture writing this weekend (& dog cuddling) ... today I'm on the high seas with Edward Coxere ... #seafever ⚓⚓⚓

I reviewed Hillary Taylor's "Language and Social Relations in early modern England" for the AHR. An excellent book and one where the thesis is one that all us early modern UK historians should sit with.

Just out in 17th Century - my new article on Leonard Wheatcroft, the bard of Ashover, ”Poetry and the Politics of the Parish”. Featuring weathercocks, a non-elite manuscript miscellany, and lots of bellringing! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Just out in 17th Century - my new article on Leonard Wheatcroft, the bard of Ashover, ”Poetry and the Politics of the Parish”. Featuring weathercocks, a non-elite manuscript miscellany, and lots of bellringing! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I am learning a lot at the Cal Tech Bacon conference--including that it is possible to program in gradations of color in Excel. I immediately used to to map how poems move around between the two main variants of Cavendish's Poems and Fancies. Look how beautiful and complicated!

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

'Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory shows how Shakespeare contributed to one of the most vibrant and innovative chapters of English theatre culture not as an isolated entity, but as a productive part of a much more diverse repertory.' Nice review of my book 😊 hdl.handle.net/11222.digili...

Are you a mid-career historian researching 17th & 18th-century British Protestant dissenting traditions? 🏛️ Apply for the Dr Williams's Trust Library Bursaries at the IHR! Three awards of £3,500 are available to support your research in London libraries and archives www.history.ac.uk/fellowships-...

Exciting to see this volume - with an essay by yours truly on Restoration theatrical rivalries - will be available imminently. It also has a very fun cover! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

This is a really useful guide if you're marking student submitted work that you suspect is at least partly AI generated - those ones that feel wrong but you can't put your finger on anything specific:

'What a brilliant night! Wills: dry, formal, boring? This was story telling at its best: intriguing, engaging, human!’ In this new blog post, find out what happened when Chris Hoban and his band, The Executors, played to a packed house in Topsham sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult... #EarlyModern 🗃️

(from www.instagram.com/nobodyssweet...)

A Peasant Calling Out: "it's very cold", 1634. Rembrandt van Rijn (The Cleveland Museum of Art)

Kick started the new work year with another installment of my 'research walk', retracing the parish boundaries of 17thC Portishead for my book on 'Everyday Life in the 17thC Village'. Got a taste of the 'Little Ice Age' - a period of colder temperatures that impacted the 17thC - by going out in -1!

🎄A FESTIVE TREAT: BONUS CHRISTMAS BLOG POST🎄 🎁As we approach the holidays, @lsangha.bsky.social has collected some of the best 'Christmassy' names in The National Archives' will registers. 🎅Featuring Mr Christmas, Christopher Pudding, John Turkey & many more 👇 sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

You will be visited by three spirits.

*small embarrassed voice* A little plug for my article on Devon book sales c. 1700, which has gone online open access. tl;dr book auctions weren't just a London/Oxbridge thing: a flourishing second-hand book market centred on Exeter included auctions from the 1680s. doi.org/10.1093/libr...

Among other things, great bit of Camberwell history

What’s a big export sector shared by Leicester, Exeter and Newcastle? Award yourself five points if you said higher education

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

Ozy has a barrow in the marketplace Mandy is the singer in a band Ozy has two vast and trunkless legs of stone And his shattered visage lies in the sand O bla di o bla da…

hi, wreck expert here! this is not funny, two vast and trunkless legs of stone only do this when they’re in extreme distress.

Ozy has a barrow in the marketplace Mandy is the singer in a band Ozy has two vast and trunkless legs of stone And his shattered visage lies in the sand O bla di o bla da…

Unimaginably still haven't seen this on my TL today so consider it my comment (again, this song continues to be as news-ready in 2025 as in 1982): "They never read that tattoo on his arm/....They never thought he'd cause folks any harm"

a tiny bit of good news is that we have secured funding to digitize john milton's copy of holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587). the images will form part of MILTON'S LIBRARY, an open-access site featuring the 10 books positively identified as milton's w/ transcriptions/translations of his marginal notes.

I want to tell all students of the so-called 'rip-off degrees' named below that your critical thinking is important and makes valid contributions to culture and society Without your skills, we wouldn't be able to unpack toxic discourses and do something about them

Who did what in early modern England? New #OpenAccess book, 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' by @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social & @aucointaylor.bsky.social, based on thousands of #EarlyModern court depositions 🗃️ Read it: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Online early from our next issue: Colin Burrow on Muriel Spark’s wickedness. More new writing at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, when the rest of the issue goes live on our website. For now, there’s ‘a world-beating buster-upper’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

And what tremendous consequences for UK HE that “good policy” has had

grateful for colleagues doing the goddess's work against-a-i.com?fbclid=IwY2x...

These photos are remarkable! While also being completely typical

Lovely open letter from October 1642, in which Lady Elizabeth Hatton, once the estranged wife of Edward Coke, tells Prince Rupert that Parliament should be the bedrock of the English state. Left for him when she fled her lands in Buckinghamshire as his army advanced.

They made me Pope! How shall I cope? Better buy some soap Smoke less dope Try not to grope Or elope

They made me Pope! How shall I cope? Better buy some soap Smoke less dope Try not to grope Or elope