You also have to pick subjects that appeal to a wide audience and that haven’t been done in the last 3-4 years … pretty tricky

Makes it quite difficult to choose given that you’re forbidden from picking anything related to professional activity

You just need enabling provisions in primary legislation … “Henry VIII powers”.

Of course, consequent policy decisions would be open to judicial review, which would annoy Reform immensely.

Oh, it’s apparently selling like hotcakes through Amazon (because the “publishers” don’t actually exist)

Yep - same guys doing the digging!

I am very keen to find out if he could

Hahahhahahahahahaha

A large cat surveys her domain #caturday

Hi, @dorianlynskey.bsky.social @iandunt.bsky.social ... I've just finished writing a history of the Illuminati and the conspiracy theories that came afterwards, and much enjoyed your episode on the topic ... if either of you would be interested in reading a copy, could you let me know?

Good questions ... Germany/HRE in 1776, specifically

Any really good repositories of historical maps that anyone could recommend?

Doing the Lord’s work, here

Chris has brightened my day enormously by revealing that Nigel Biggar, of Uncritical Colonialism fame, seems to have been awarded a well-deserved third in his undergraduate History degree.

The "Britain spent 1.8% of GDP on suppressing slavery" claim is mostly nonsense

Even the academic article which first made the claim - which *cites itself* and provides no other evidence - states that the actual cost was only 0.14%

The remainder? Estimated opportunity costs

There is something dreadfully dystopian about all of this

Really glad you enjoyed it!

Third lecture now online - www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-l... - on the New Psychology and ideas of the self. (1/2)

Came close a while back to writing a book about the “nearly men” of professional sport - the guys who worked away but didn’t quite make it, and had little to show for it.

This is much better than anything I’d have written.

‘An unsolved mystery of science’: why do I dream about my teeth falling out? Experts say such dreams of dental distress may relate to the processing of various emotions and experiences

Every night.

Well, every time I dream.

Same tooth every time, the one that got mangled playing cricket in Delhi.

www.theguardian.com/wellness/202...

A large statue of a knobbly bipedal dinosaur, standing in a museum garden, with many trees and bushes around

Impressive guy guarding National Museums Kenya

I’m not sure that Deliveroo has yet had a profitable year, but Viscount Ridley’s pronouncement of doom has not materialised

Amazon and Uber, to name but two, took years and years to turn a profit

This is a cat who does not care about the wreckage of fur on the sheets, or the fact that I cannot reach the book without risking terrible injury

Screenshot of David Simon interview SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.

How does an Allen Lane paperback by a Wolfson Prize winner get the name of a prime minister wrong?

Plotting the chapters for the final section of the book I'm writing and, out of context, it looks like I've finally cracked:

After the Know-Nothings in the 1850s and the Union Party in 1860, the biggest third-party delegation in U.S. congressional history (25 reps) was the Anti-Masonic Party in the 1830s.

They believed that the Illuminati and the masons were corrupting the world. Plus ca change.

The Spectator in 1921:

"Mrs. Webster shows what a bad influence certain sections of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe have played in fomenting revolution ... Our own strong impression is that [she] is getting on the right track in connecting the Protocols and llluminism"

Serendipitous discovery that the first (and maybe the last) Englishman to meet and write about Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, was Henry Crabb Robinson during his German years

Glad you enjoyed it!