An amazing opportunity to work with wonderful writer and teacher of historical fiction, @girlhermes.bsky.social! ✒️📚📖 #HistFic #BookSky

I'm teaching a 12 week course for the amazing @writerscentre.bsky.social - do join me in September if that's your jam: nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/events/how-t...

Pleased to say @oxlifelonglearning.bsky.social have commissioned a new live online course from me for summer 2026 onward! Medieval Chivalry for 10 weeks! Chat with me weekly! lifelong-learning.ox.ac.uk/courses/medi... Please share.

Just putting this out there… books.google.co.uk/books?id=UVk...

Lots of commentary on this piece already, all of which I agree with. For historians, research is a fundamental part of writing. To farm it out to AI changes the nature of this intellectual process in fundamental ways. And as Stacy Schiff points out, it also takes all the fun out of it.

ON TOP of the ethical reasons to not use AI, it's also 1) bad at what it does 2) literally makes you stupider 3) has HUGE environmental costs: every search is equivalent to pouring out an entire bottle of water. It's not worth it to generate a cutesy emoji or have it write an error-riddled draft.

It is deeply hilarious that the Hudson's Bay Company was founded in 1670 and chugged along for three and a half centuries and Private Equity finished it off in like five years.

I'm teaching a 12 week course for the amazing @writerscentre.bsky.social - do join me in September if that's your jam: nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/events/how-t...

Seriously, FUCK Boundless. Writers, do not publish with them. Agents, do not submit to them. Bookstores, do not carry their books. Any company that thinks torching this many authors will result in being able to “continue publishing and rebuild trust” is delusional and deserves to die.

Outrageously spectacular illuminated manuscript from 1470 Siena Duomo

Fantastic ending to Baroness Kidron's speech in the House of Lords yesterday, which led to the government's defeat on AI & copyright. Speaking the UK's creators: "Their property, their labour, is worthy of your protection - because apart from anything else, it is not ours to give away."

It's peony envy season!

I reviewed THE PRETENDER by Jo Harkin and found it dazzlingly brilliant. A true pleasure. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Taking a moment to celebrate the iconic sartorial stylings of rural Hampshire in the late 80s.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Just some basic fact-checking would be nice. Anyway, I wrote about Eostre here: florencehrs.substack.com/p/eostre-pag...

Amazing scenes in the carpark today.

It's the anniversary of my grandfather's death today and also the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I think he'd have enjoyed this fact if he could have known it. I can hear his chuckle. Missed and loved, dear Gaffer.

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

Love Sonja's thoughts here - as I so often do.

Highly erotic.

Creative writing AND ancient object handling. My teenage self would have killed for such an experience.

Short story writers! I am running an 8-week online course, 'What can a short story do?', exploring the possibilities of this wonderful form. We'll read 8 contemporary short stories and use them as a launchpad for our own writing. #booksky #amwriting #shortstories More details ⬇️

History as a university subject for all is in deep peril. By the end of this Parliament you might need a row of A*s to study it, in just a handful of elite institutions. Is that what you really want?

AGENTS, do not ghost your authors! I hear about this so often and it's horrible behaviour. Just end your relationship in a professional manner if that's what you want to do. Authors, if you've been treated like this, please know it says more about them than you. Please keep writing.

All genuine historical work is revisionist. It revises what we thought we knew, with new evidence & new interpretations, in the present, for the present, respecting the reality of the past AND the multiple things it can be made to say. Everything else is self-interested myth-making.

I'm really enjoying Helen Castor's The Eagle and The Hart. I wanted to read it for John Talbot's origin story, but it has the bonus of rehabilitating Henry IV in my mind and introducing the fascinatingly peculiar character of Richard II. One could write a good novel about a man like that.

So the Ammonite Order of architecture exists just enough to get its own Wikipedia page. This is from Gideon Mantell's house Castle Place on Lewes High St, designed by Amon Wilds.

We're on strike tomorrow at UEA. Nearly 200 jobs are currently targeted for redundancy. Over 600 staff will have been cut since 2023 if these redundancies go ahead. Fewer staff = heavy workloads, poor morale, more stress & burnout & bigger classes. We can't do more with less @uea-ucu.bsky.social

5 years working on Eleanor Talbot and I still feel the excruciating urge to addend all my emails with PS I AM NOT A CRACKPOT.

www.thebookseller.com/news/society... 👇

Snakeshead fritillaries in my garden. One of my favourite flowers - I'm never not thrilled when they appear.

A very old hot cross bun, on display in the Tudor House museum in Southampton. It was once rumoured to have been carried on board the Mayflower, apparently #hotcrossbun #mayflower #medieval

Can already confirm this book is incredible! Research chops, beautiful writing and so much sensitive human insight. Get your preorders in!

I'm in a book group and people are noping out of Revolutionary Road 7 pages in because Frank Wheeler's view of April must also be Richard Yates' view. I'm so confused. Do we not credit authors with, like... trying to do a thing? Could it be that an author may be critical of the POV they represent?

Spooned out beyond belief that NENEH CHERRY put my novel in her top 5 most influential books written by women. NENEH CHERRY sat by the fire listening to my nonsense. I cannot. I cannot. womensprize.com/bookshelfie-...

Yes! heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-17-2...

So they're really deciding that anything achieved or contributed by anyone who isn't strictly straight, cis, white, and male is DEI, ie woke madness. What a fight all these people have had to be recognised as humans, citizens, of value, only to be disappeared at the click of a button.

We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the ground, with the help of Ceres. BL Harley 4431; Christine de Pizan, Various including 'L'Épître Othéa; c.1410-c.1414 CE; France, Central (Paris); f.107v

Names of Merchant Adventurers that we like. A short list: Suckling Spendlove. Samuel Blackbeard. Theophilus Davy Garrencieres. Isabella Blaufront. Marmaduke Sutheby. Bartholomew Bannister. Phynias Bell. Lancelot Foster. Walsingham Cooke. Dyxson Darnton. Lumley Kettlewell.

Details of my 8-week online short story course are now on the Creative Scotland Opportunities page. ✒️ Come explore the fantastic world of short fiction with me this May and June! opportunities.creativescotland.com/opportunity/...

My garden needs some attention but is blessed with some big fat wodges of primroses. The aquilegia is unfurling and you can see the bluebells popping up too. Spring!

My favourite early-modern naming convention is when there's a bunch of sisters named Anne, Mary, Catherine and Elizabeth and casually in amongst them one named Xanthippe or Howard or Chatzarmavet.

This is a prayer roll made c1445 for Margaret, Queen to Henry VI. Long considered a conventional object of feminine piety, the roll was, as I reveal here, a public show of a queen’s function in a royal regime: to soften the king’s image so he cd maintain the veneer of strength. tinyurl.com/5cb2z5kk

Between 1927 & 1933 four nuns at Eibingen Abbey replicated by hand the renowned manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen’s magnum opus, Scivias. When the original 12C manuscript disappeared after WWII, the replica became a facsimile-original. I tell the story of that facsimile here tinyurl.com/3mcb6vt7

I'm thinking towards my next project on #WorldBookDay - On Saturday I'm hosting a One Man Conference on Ancient Houses to help financially support writing my coming book The Buildings Archaeologist during the summer. If you'd like to help please do join us www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/one-man-co...

7th birthday for me. My first Horrible Histories book and utterly formative. I read it cover to cover on a train. Later my mother would confiscate all my Horrible Histories because I was too dogmatic at the dinner table re Marlowe being the true author of Shakespeare.

@dianewatt.bsky.social I'm enjoying God's Own Gentlewoman very much! Riveting stuff and I really appreciate how much of yourself you include explicitly. For this particular book it feels very appropriate to acknowledge the specific point in time and space a biographer is working from.

What I need young people to understand is that, while it may be fine and normal for them to move in herds while dressed in 1990s fashion and haircuts, for me as a 40-year-old woman it is like passing through a cloud of ghosts

National Trust membership for a family costs £14.05 a month. A Telegraph subscription costs £104 a month. And don’t get me started on the quality of the product.