Leading up to the #WolfsonHistoryPrize awards season, we’ll be giving away a book each month from the 2025 shortlist. Follow @wolfsonhistory.bsky.social to be the first to know about upcoming giveaways.
Three year postdoc going at @qmulsse.bsky.social working with @karlpike.bsky.social on ‘Politics and mythmaking: disentangling myth from ideology’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Details here:
I understand why some find The Drama's subject matter distasteful but I thought it a brilliantly unnerving exploration of the psychological devastation wreaked when the person you love reveals something shocking about their past. Laugh, wince or root for the couple? I found myself doing all three.
ICYMI: 11 days left to apply for this fully funded PhD at UCL with me and @jameselder.bsky.social working on BT's extraordinary film collection – which records the birth of the information society. For details and how to apply: www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...
‘Every mickle makes a muckle’ Charles Madge collects some wonderful proverbs from his Glaswegian working-class informants in Wartime Patterns of Spending and Saving (1943)
Always intrigued when a student photo on file differs quite dramatically from the individual that I've encountered in my classroom. A reinvention of the self has evidently occurred and I feel vicariously excited for them.
We are pleased to be supporting the "Modern British History and the 'Environmental Turn'" worshop at Lincoln College, University of Oxford @oxhistoryfaculty.bsky.social) on 16 - 17 September 2026
See call for papers (closes 15 May 2026) below:
pastandpresent.org.uk/call-for-pap...
Shout-out to all the music teachers re-orchestrating the songs of Olivia Rodrigo for bassoon octet.
It's been the week for school concerts, which means Coldplay arranged for violin, flute and guitar, an Abba medley belted out by wind-band plus possibly the most charming rendition of Entrance of the Queen of Sheba I have ever heard, courtesy of a year-seven marimba ensemble.
‘If you want to go to a forest, phone Werner.’ John Berger to Susan Sontag, August 1990. (I wonder whether this is still Werner’s number…)
I am called upon to provide a 'wet signature'. What an unlovely phrase.
True. In this case, Co-Pilot’s summary was basically fine, but I felt so utterly stripped by it of authorial voice.
Asking AI to summarise one of your own articles is distressing. The result is superficially accurate but so much nuance is lost, not just of argument but of tone, voice, style - everything that makes an article a piece of *writing* which tries to create a *reading* experience for its audience.
Had an appreciative little note from a reader in my email this morning. Never underestimate the importance of these things. Writing is a pretty lonely, unrewarding experience on the whole, and often it can feel pointless. So it is enormously encouraging to know that someone’s enjoyed what you wrote.
Great to see the Guardian covering this kind of work, by @drkrisztinailko.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
How to Reach a Broader Audience: An Introduction to Non-Fiction Trade Publishing in 2026. The IHR-Curtis Brown initiative aims to de-mystify the process of writing for broader audiences and navigating the publishing process. FREE online 26 March 2-4pm
www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
My take on the Gwyneth Paltrow Oscars dress discourse: this was a clear case of GP, a stunningly beautiful woman in her 50s, trying to be not boring, in which she succeeded.
Please share! EHR is hosting a free one-day symposium at St John's College, Oxford, on Friday 17 April, 10-6, on the theme 'When there are no sources'.
Further details and how to sign up here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-there...
I don’t think Churchill & Austen etc are entitled to stay on the banknotes forever but as a lifelong and avowed enemy of all things ‘twee’, I do fear for the future of our currency.
Interestingly, as my kids get closer in age to my students, I find that I have more insight into their cultural worlds and feel less bewildered or distressed. (Although, admittedly, I experienced plenty of those things watching Louis Theroux's Manosphere documentary last njght...)
Revisiting the pioneering @demos-uk.bsky.social study, The New Old (2003) & it's fascinating to consider how the Boomer discourse has transformed in two decades as this cohort has aged. (Also, 'TV dinners' anyone?!)
Five intense minutes of me eye-balling you in a confined space on The Social Democracy to Neoliberalism Metanarrative and How Historians Have Sought to Complicate It. It would certainly be pedagogically innovative...
Maybe this should be the new way for academics to deliver lecture content?
I've got a bad feeling about this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l5R...
The more interesting point (possibly what T-C was attempting to get at) is how film exists as a genuinely popular art form, unburdened by the 'elite' associations of opera & ballet & through which quite sophisticated & complex ideas can be communicated to mass audiences www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Excellent news - this will be an immensely important archival collection for future historians of gender, politics and public life in the Thatcher and New Labour era.
I didn’t! Need to freeze-frame and magnify…
Maybe most Gen Z men don’t have wives - ask them again in ten years?
Lots of bared flesh in Cambridge today. Guys, I love your spirit, but it’s really not that warm.
Also: what is the book that Jude Law is reaching for on the shelf in the shop in the Uber Eats ad.
