It's going to be even worse the next time they appoint Peter Mandelson

Exploring the Prize Papers, a global early modern archive Using language skills, examine previously unknown records from the Prize Papers collection and produce descriptions to support digitisation.

Dream positions: 3 (!!) PhD placements at the Prize Papers with emphasis on finding students with the following language skills: French, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. (Of course, I emphasize the Dutch language!)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/professional...

Very excited by policy offers of bringing back the great British spiv

Someone in the archive, examining an old document, wearing gloves.

Our MA Early Modern Studies trains you in palaeography, book history & archival research skills, plus options in information & literary studies, history & language.
Join us for a taster lecture, learn more about the course & ask questions
📅1 May 2-3:30pm BST online
app.geckoform.com/events-embed...

Seems a good day to remember that, in his book An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture, Hungary's favourite right-wing thinker Roger Scruton implied that the Pet Shop Boys made a 'minimal contribution' to their own records. They successfully sued him for libel. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...

The villages are hotbeds of invisible poverty and astonishing wealth inequality. Ask me how I know! (Or rather don’t, I get quite worked up about it all.)

The fields are owned by agribusinesses that have replaced the ancien regime patrician Tory gentry and don’t employ many locals, which led to huge levels of structural unemployment since the 80s.

It’s right to look at the Greens in Mid-Suffolk and point out their hypocrisies. But Mid-Suffolk is not “prosperous market towns and green fields“. Stowmarket is working class and historically voted Labour.

RIP Keith Hodiak.

It’s one thing to design an iconic antagonist.

It’s another for the performer to create one out of a unitard, a mask and his own supreme talent in movement.

Oh very interesting! We want to do similar, but measuring up the back wall suggests a heat pump would be a tricky fit and because we’re in a conservation zone the solar panels placement would be uh inefficient

Photo of the double spread of an open book of printed music, over which have been trodden cat-sized paw prints in ink. Reference: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, F. 1756 A LP, "Tomus secundus psalmorum selectorum" (Nürnberg, 1539).

Attention #earlyModern #bookHistory and #earlyMusic types!

You have to the end of the week to register for the @dormeme16.bsky.social conference Marking Music: The Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe, at KCL. Registration and the brilliant programme are at www.tickettailor.com/events/aheve...

Really pleased to share my (open access!) article on immigration control in early modern England, feat. rights-bearing subjects, rightsless migrants, and experiments in immigration control

Heirloom Books: Family Memory, Genealogy, and English Archives, c.1450–1850* Abstract. This article examines English primers, bibles and prayer books which were passed down within families and preserved as heirlooms between c.1450 a

December Issue: Alexandra Walsham on 'Heirloom Books: Family Memory, Genealogy, and English Archives, c.1450–1850'

academic.oup.com/ehr/article/...

@emodcam.bsky.social

at last, a king of france we can all get behind

a slight shudder of recognition from the plague year, when @jonnelledge.bsky.social and I - both stuck home alone -spent Christmas Day doing a synchronised rewatch of Warriors of the Deep

Ashton: I Unreservedly Apologise - Ipswich Town News Town chairman and chief executive Mark Ashton has issued an unreserved apology for the hurt caused by this week’s controversial visit by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and the manner the club then dealt with the subsequent furore.

Ashton: I Unreservedly Apologise #itfc #efl #championship

Tipperary pub, Ireland, 1952, photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Please do spread the word about the @srsrensoc.bsky.social Scholars of Colour MA Scholarship Awards -- two pots of £4,000 each, and an optional mentoring opportunity. I've very much enjoyed being a mentor to a fantastic scholar through this scheme!

Painting by Joos van Winghe (circa 1600) entitled 'Elegant company, playing with torchlight'. Group of musicians playing lute, flute, harpsichord and a singer, with other instruments on a table in the foreground.

⚠️Register before 12 April ⚠️
Marking Music: the Use of Music Books in Early Modern Europe
11–12 May 2026 @cemskcl.bsky.social & online
For scholars of music, book history & related to explore how people engaged with books containing music in early modern period.
www.tickettailor.com/events/aheve...

Claxon 📣 for English lit. graduates: here's a fully funded 4-year PhD position at Leiden led by the fabulous Dr Lotte Fikkers, and co-supervised by yours truly, on literary representations of wardship in early modern English drama.

bit.ly/4bEeH7a

Apply by 31 May 2026; starting date 1 Jan. 2027

See also, UCU

Close up on an eighteenth-century handwritten text where the name "Pudding Harvey" is written in larger letters and underlined

From the same manuscript, a hand drawing of the profile of a corpulent man with a round head and receding hairline - or more likely a wig, this being the eighteenth century

Pudding Harvey!

Tell your kids, rummaging through MSS at the BL is the most fun one can have!

The Bodleian Daybook and the Purchase of Second-Hand Books | The Library Oxford, Bodleian Library, Library Records e. 9 (the Daybook) is a ‘Book of Accompts for the Librarie’ that covers the seven-year period following the death of Sir Thomas Bodley. It contains details of two consignments of second-hand books purchased by ...

Long in the making….here’s my new article about second-hand books and the Bodleian www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

Ipswich Town have hard questions to answer after Nigel Farage PR disaster | Nick Ames Reform’s use of the football club has shocked fans and left the ownership red faced but how did it happen?

Politics and football don’t mix? Tell that to Ipswich’s players, who are not happy about Farage’s visit. What a mess, and many tough questions still to answer: www.theguardian.com/football/202...

The Armenian Who Learned Greek in Ancient Egypt Or: Why my (probably) favourite historical document is a unique Armenian text without a word of Armenian. But first, a break from your scheduled linguistics, with a message from our sponsor (my fle…

No other ancient document holds my interest and affection quite like this one papyrus, written in Egypt in the Armenian alphabet. It's a goldmine of linguistic evidence not for the Egyptian or Armenian language, but for Greek!

Here's my enthusiastic introduction to it:
dannybate.com/2026/03/24/t...

“Football club is apolitical” simply doesn’t cut it when that football club has been naive enough to let a political party trample all over it for its own self-advertisement - anybody could have seen what Reform and Farage were going to pull at Ipswich & it appears they were hardly discouraged.

Donate We couldn't do the work we do without your support. I want to donate. Alternatively you can donate to us securely via bank transfer (BACS) here: Suffolk Refugee Support Ltd, Lloyds Bank, 30-94-55...

ah fuck off Farage, and fuck off Ipswich Town. Support our refugee neighbours: suffolkrefugee.org.uk/what-you-can...

There’s something unhappily disorienting about having had a parent die on Good Friday. You end up with movable grief.