LSBU blocks access to pension & threatens academics with the sack if they don't accept new terms with increased workloads London South Bank University (LSBU) has threatened to put all its academic staff at risk of redundancy in a restructure that would divide the workforce into teaching or research streams, worsening ter...

The state of British academia: my partner was made redundant from one uni after 14 (14)yrs on fixed-term contracts, & has now begun a short-term fixed contract at another that is threatening to put all (all) its academic staff at risk of redundancy in a “fire & rehire” www.ucu.org.uk/article/1445...

Breakfast - 20/04/2026 The latest news, sport, business and weather from the BBC's Breakfast team.

You can watch the moment on iPlayer here. From 6m and 10s into the programme.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

And you can complain to the BBC here:

www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comp...

I preferred it when the BBC messed up in the other direction.

Cat sat in aubretia purple flowers.

I am hoping our garden aubretia is "wild"? The cat, not so much.
#wildflowerhour

Lecturer in English Literature The Department of English provides education at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels, and is part of the Faculty of Humanities. The Department has a staff of about 35 people. There are ap

Exciting lecturing job being advertised in the Department of English at Stockholm University - with a desirable expertise in 19thc literature:
@bars.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @univeng.bsky.social @englishassociation.bsky.social
su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

People in the Budapest Metro, Hungary, shouting: “Russians, go home!”

I spent 16, SIXTEEN years fighting this crap.

I can’t believe it 😭

West Ham out of bottom 3.
Held a hamster.
Rescued two toads.
And now Orbán flushed away.
Ez volt a legjobb hétvégém valaha.

Well we will find your book fascinating.
Well, yes - the glossaries and notes were quite the endeavour - as you say "of-the-moment references" (many anonymised / obscured) took a deal of time - but we feel Egan's sprees & rambles warranted it.
Here they are, in a fight not far from Covent Garden.

Fabulous - looks grand. Excited to read your "Tom & Jerry" chapter especially! Our new Oxford World's Classics edition of Life in London comes out in spring 27.

Jan-Werner Müller | At a Budapest Scruton Café Tourists might stumble into a Scruton café in quite different parts of Budapest: one is on the second floor of a...

‘Maybe Orbán can afford to lose, hoping he’ll be back soon enough. But the immediate reaction of many observers, not just in Hungary, would still be that one of the most prominent models for the far right internationally has been defeated.’

On the Hungarian elections:

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ap...

Photo of purple / pink Aubretia in full spring bloom

The Aubretia is back and proud.

By Our Selves + Q&A with Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting Toby Jones, Andrew Kötting (as a straw bear) and their merry men revive the wanderings and wonderings of Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare.

Special screening of the feature film about John Clare, "By Our Selves" (2015), with a Q&A featuring actor Toby Jones, writer Iain Sinclair and director Andrew Kotting, Bristol, 7 April, @wshed.bsky.social:
www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/1376...

Excited to read a translation of what is supposedly the only autobiography by an enslaved person, from across all of Latin America - by the Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano (1840). Manzano was probably born in 1797, same year as Mary Shelley.

Reviewing a paper just reminded me why I'm always so disappointed when people just do keyword searches on certain terms (often only within a defined set of journals or conferences) as a way of doing a literature review of a subject, and conclude that they have thoroughly reviewed the literature 1/5

Unique daily likers as a graph over the last year. It's down from about 1.6 million a day a year ago to 1.1 million a day now.

I tend to get dogpiled every time I say this but: as someone *who likes bluesky and benefits from being here* we have a problem.

The network is shrinking, not growing. It's shrinking a lot: only about 1.1m people a day even like a post. This time last year it was 1.6m.

Snippet of the introduction’s title line, “The Material Conditions of Victorian Poetry,” with two versions of the phrase “Victorian Poetry” laid on top of one another. One version is not italicized and refers to the field of study. The other version is italicized and refers to the journal, which has undergone a series of seismic transitions as a direct result of the erosion of literary studies and higher ed.

A new special issue of VP on material conditions is out & it’s a banger. It considers what it looks like to interrogate the protocols whereby intellectual production’s insides are quarantined from their constitutive outsides in conversation with Victorian poetry. muse.jhu.edu/issue/56685

Excited to read a translation of what is supposedly the only autobiography by an enslaved person, from across all of Latin America - by the Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano (1840). Manzano was probably born in 1797, same year as Mary Shelley.

Brilliant. One of the floors contains a gym, which is nice. So you walk in through the smell of aircraft diesel fumes, then up to 38th floor to work out to film of RFK pumping iron, b4 a lecture in front of an 80-foot statue of Il Dumbo Duce, in toilet seat gold.
Library of the freedom future.

The very best thing about the exciting Trump Presidential Library is the complete absence of books, shelves, librarians, people reading.

Reform insiders fear links to extreme figures such as Andrew Tate will scare off voters Nigel Farage has called Tate an ‘important voice’ for young men and held back from criticising his misogynistic views

Racist misogynists worried that association with racist misogynists will make them look more racist and misogynist.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

Image of first paragraph of essay "Poverty in Antiquity: Introduction" By CLAIRE TAYLOR "I hate the poor (abomino paupero|s])," wrote someone on a wall in Pompeii shortly before the eruption that destroyed the town (CIL 4,9839b). "Anyone who wants something for nothing is an idiot. Let him pay over his money, and he can have it."

Phenomenal opening lines, in the opening essay, of first volume of 6, of the new @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social "Cultural History of Poverty", already my favourite publication of 2026. Seems Western / European society has always despised the poor, & has always treated poverty as a moral failing.

just this week:

-- OpenAI killed Sora
-- Disney subsequently cancelled its investment in OpenAI
-- Wikipedia is now banning LLM-generated content

...tell me again how this is all "inevitable" and you have to "get on board or get left behind"?

By Our Selves + Q&A with Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting Toby Jones, Andrew Kötting (as a straw bear) and their merry men revive the wanderings and wonderings of Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare.

Special screening of the feature film about John Clare, "By Our Selves" (2015), with a Q&A featuring actor Toby Jones, writer Iain Sinclair and director Andrew Kotting, Bristol, 7 April, @wshed.bsky.social:
www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/1376...

The chatbot that worked with Matt Goodwin on his latest book has now realised he's just deadweight and has signed a deal with Penguin for its debut novel, about the struggle of being a working class language model in a middle class industry. Already hailed as "the AI Sons And Lovers", by itself.

Stunning poem by Lorine Niedecker, "His Carpets Flowered", about William Morris:
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56196/...

Armchair anti-racist activism we can all do easily.

Come join our English Literature team in the School of Critical Studies @uofgartshums.bsky.social @glasgow.ac.uk - as a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature with a specialism in Poetry - & pls pass this on:
#AcademicSky
www.jobs.gla.ac.uk/job/lecturer...