My New Year's Gift to you all is news that the brilliant, provocative, stays-with-you-long-after-the-curtain-falls JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN is coming to the UK with a short run at London's Royal Court in March/April. Book your tickets now (I already have). royalcourttheatre.com/events/john-...

Christmas Eve at the Bodleian ✨ "The rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting." 📚 | Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Please, TV Gods, I NEED this to be good and not a terrible disappointment.

Close enough.

Don't steal pies this Christmas.

Respect to Phyllis, interviewed by researchers in 1986, who was doing part-time nursing into her late sixties in order to say, 'quite truthfully', when invited to social events by her retired friends, 'sorry I can't come.'

In the aftermath of the office Christmas lunch, we're taking festive hat inspiration from the archives This collection of unposed looking seasonal revellers featured as part of the Brewers' Society's long running 'Beer is best' ad campaign #ArchiveAdventCalendar #FestiveClothes

If you're a university-based historian needing advice and inspiration on how to tackle that tricky second book project, this event is for you www.history-uk.ac.uk/2025/12/08/h...

If anyone remembers that list which said historians were second in line to be replaced by AI, I've had some thoughts about it... and how it relates to some aspects of public history and the current climate facing historians. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Winter bugs season has arrived and it feels like my head is 80% phlegm right now.

So many of the postwar retirees I am writing about are fixated on their gardens. I’ve never had the faintest interest in this activity but I need to understand its vegetal pleasures. I’ve read Olivia Laing’s Garden Against Time, which has opened the gate a little, but what/whom else should I read?

We are pleased to launch today a new programme for early career researchers with @ihr.bsky.social & @chalkefestival.bsky.social 'Pitch my Project' is an opportunity for early career historians to present their research at the Chalke History Festival in 2026 bit.ly/44kfUMM Applications now invited.

Colourful paintball splurges on the building by Kew Bridge from which the owner removed Banksy’s goat silhouette during renovations (rumoured to have been sold for ££££ to a US collector). The work of a disgruntled local art lover or has the reclusive artist struck again?

Colourful paintball splurges on the building by Kew Bridge from which the owner removed Banksy’s goat silhouette during renovations (rumoured to have been sold for ££££ to a US collector). The work of a disgruntled local art lover or has the reclusive artist struck again?

This is good, but a superior formulation is: 'We've met, haven't we?' (Delivered with a warm, disarming smile.) Then onus is on interlocutor to confirm or deny. You're welcome.

Agree this is a must-read. It also clarifies what I find so distressing about AI-generated writing: call me pretentious, but I take joy and care in choosing my words. If you receive an email from me, please know that I have crafted and selected these sentences, however banal, especially for you.

If you are a historian with policy-facing interests who has recently submitted their PhD (or will do so imminently), this fantastic new London-based postdoc fellowship in Applied History could be for you. www.history.ac.uk/fellowships/...

Has anyone In Real Life ever done that thing in films where you switch place-settings at a wedding/formal dinner in order to sit next to a more desirable companion/target subject?

If it were steel works we would have a government bailout plan, yet losing thousands of jobs at unis is met with a shrug. & unlike steelworks universities were profitable when they had foreign students. You are killing the golden goose… one of our best exports… HOW IS THIS HELPING GROWTH?!

No one will never out-Christmas Nancy.

The winner of the #WolfsonHistoryPrize 2025 is… Hannah Durkin for 'Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade'. @wmcollinsbooks.bsky.social A big congratulations to Hannah!

This evening, the winner of the #WolfsonHistoryPrize 2025 will be announced live! Join us in celebrating outstanding history. We will be posting live from the winner ceremony, so make sure you're following @wolfsonhistory.bsky.social and #WolfsonHistoryPrize for live updates throughout the night.

Neuroscience news story today claims that our intellect and personality ‘plateaus’ between ages of 32 & 66, and all I can say is that there have been a hell of lot of potholes and hidden dips in my plateau.

Have been devouring the brilliant Girlbands Forever series on iPlayer & my God, All Saints’ Melanie Blatt is just so achingly cool. Watch it for her deadpan use of the c-word alone. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Spend time with some of the nicest people in Cambridge (and their archives)👇

How to finance old age has been a problem since the inception of Britain’s welfare state. Why is #pensionreform so difficult? 🔓 Chris Renwick’s new Behind the Times is free for 7 days www.historytoday.com/archive/behi...

Asked a question about beer-poking yesterday. Bluesky delivered👇

Reading about an old lady, early 20th century, who celebrated collecting her weekly pension by sending a niece to fetch half a pint of stout from the beer-shop. 'She had the poker in the fire,' the niece recalls, 'they used to put it into the stout.' Help me: WHY WOULD YOU PUT A HOT POKER IN BEER?

How do I stop Outlook cutely animating the word ‘congratulations’ every time I use it in an email? It’s channelling Trolls glitter scrapbooking vibes which is doing nothing for my scholarly gravitas.

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

NEWS: In a moving and poignant case study for modern heritage, the government has announced that the National Covid Memorial Wall in Lambeth will be permanently preserved, less than five years after its creation. Detailed feasibility studies will determine the best methods of ongoing conservation.

Yes, I thought this. Weird to resign rather than sacking the people who were, you know, actually responsible for the dodgy Panorama edit.

Commuting is such sweet spectatorship. I glory as the white-haired man clutching the pink Royal Academy of Arts carrier bag barrels on at Hammersmith within a whisker of the carriage doors sliding shut.

Did you take part in a mock election at your UK school or college between 1983 and 2001? Share your memories for a research project on young people and democracy in modern Britain! Write to us about your experiences here: forms.office.com/e/FNAwjfFR7f

Were there a banter test I surely would fail it www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What happens when nationalist history meets the horrors of empire? For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, I reviewed a new exhibition on British counterinsurgency at the Imperial War Museum jacobin.com/2025/11/brit...

An evening on Southbank with the peerless Zadie Smith. She talked about needing love - as opposed to critical attention and good faith - from readers as antithetical to honest writing, but we loved her anyway.

Matt Goodwin attributes a crime that he now knows appears to have been committed by people born in Britain in the early 1990s to "mass uncontrolled immigration"

Interesting conversation with a colleague about integrating elements of fiction into scholarly writing. My view: historians can deploy novelistic devices to tell the story, set the scene, make the actors vivid etc, but I don't actually want them to make stuff up (even if they say they're doing it)

🚨We’re hiring a Junior Research Fellow in Economic History (Sept 2026–Aug 2029) at Wadham College, University of Oxford. It’s a genuinely supportive place to work. Happy to answer any questions. Spread the word! www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/about/the-da...

If the model here is that you let a private company conquer a country, co-opt local elites to exploit it for profit and govern it by force, while providing no public services and never worrying about elections, then, yes - this is a really good analogy, Mr Kruger.

My book UP IN THE AIR: A HISTORY OF HIGH-RISE BRITAIN is out today!

🎉We are pleased to announce new Applied History Fellowships in partnership with @royalhistsoc.org & @findmypast.bsky.social. Join us on the 19 November at our launch event to find out more about the Fellowships and how to apply: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Am belatedly reading Intermezzo and I’d forgotten, Sally Rooney really doesn’t like sentences, does she? (Or plot.)

The foyer at the National Archives is currently home to a Slow Horses/Netflix tie-in MI5-themed display, but honestly there aren’t sufficient numbers of empty whiskey bottles or discarded takeaway containers to be truly convincing.

In my post for Imperial & Global Forum (@exeter.ac.uk), I compare how different colonial governments handled records towards the end of the British Empire imperialglobalexeter.com/2025/10/16/d... Based on my paper in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 (OA) doi.org/10.1080/0308...

Using generative AI to access practical information is a bit like asking a distracted teenager what time their school concert starts, or when their homework is due. The answer *might* be right, but you feel as though you probably ought to check just in case.

We're excited to announce the call for papers for #MBS26, the next Modern British Studies conference, at Birmingham in June 2026. We'll be launching the #MBS Association at this event, to support further regular conferences in Modern British Studies. www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/moder...

“Critical” skills shortages : ‘authors, writers, translators ‘ …