Was it just me, or did that Olly Robbins testimony not make much sense?

Awful. The years of it you’ve had, too. Just awful.

Breaking: science and technology minister fired from outer space as PM emails from orbit “That I was not told I was being fired into space is unforgivable and has made me very angry. Sadly it will be 2037 before any chance of rescue is possible.”

Front page of Guardian photo — for a minute I really thought this was an image of the PM climbing into a space capsule: this week, the ISS prob the safest place for him to be…

See also his Punishment Park (1971)!

Friday

Coming soon: The Haunted Archive - A Ghost Story Manuscript of M.R. James A beautiful annotated facsimile manuscript edition of M.R. James's classic ghost story 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'.

@kickstarter.com now live!

Annotated Facsimile #MRJames manuscript

bit.ly/OhWhistle

Contributors include:

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‘Kinell!

Emergency fluffy kitten: here is next door’s cat, asleep by the desk where I work

Pro tip: before an important speech, I always find it really boosts confidence to smear some lemon drizzle cake into your crotch at a cafe near the venue

Whoever he’s meant to be, why is he healing Jeffrey Epstein would be my main question

Are those the four horsemen of the Apocalypse behind him, with their plus one Stephen Miller?

I would listen to more retro discussions about EU dynamic alignment but I suddenly remembered I had an appointment to stick my head inside an Airbus A380 jet engine

I guess coming out of Ozon’s The Stranger with a feeling of complete indifference is paradoxically the sign of a really good adaptation

I just googled 'factory roof truss designs.' You?

The Great Majority: Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger Luckhurst exhumes the history of this period, when anatomists fuelled a body-snatching trade led by “resurrection men” and reformers sought alternatives to the toxic urban graveyards and their pestilent fumes.

Today's #history article pick from Damn History, a free newsletter for readers/writers of #popularhistory. Congrats to writer @theprofrog.bsky.social & @publicdomainrev.bsky.social!

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Typical msm failure to report overnight American annexation

Gateway in the uk too!

May issue of Sight & Sound with my piece on Akira — but also great interview with Mark Jenkin on Rose of Nevada

All best for speedy recovery, Martin

Warner Bros. to Adapt Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Into a Feature Film - Reactor Melina Matsoukas is set to direct

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is finally getting a movie:

Digging out my 12" single of 'Good Technology' by the Red Guitars (now a mere 42 years old) to get that couplet I've been half-humming for a couple of days exactly right: 'We've got computers that can find us friends/We know roughly when the world will end.'

Since Trump's common psychical tic is unconscious projection, 'A whole civilisation will die tonight' feels like his threnody to the end of American civilisation in its late stages of imperial decadence and cultural collapse.

Pay-walled: figures show total academic workforce contracting 'for the first time', with 8% loss of jobs in English, down to 4680 staff in the discipline. Why they go to an Oxford English prof for comment seems bewildering when this feels very far away from frontline cuts.

Reform UK announcing a policy of punitive refusal of visas to countries claiming reparations for slavery feels like an inadvertent major recognition of the reparations argument: that it is justified enough to require a response. UK govts have previously just coughed slightly and changed the subject!

Happy Easter!

Good display combo in Waterstones Traf Sq (also wrote a couple of chapters for this lovely DK History of Horror, just out)

A pile of copies of The Recollections by Christopher Priest. The book has a strong yellow cover, and the title and author are in bright red. The surface they are sitting on is black.

Publication day! The Recollections by Christopher Priest is out today. Get your copy from our website or in other places where books are sold. briardenebooks.uk/product/the-...

Sometimes perfectly innocent words can be arranged into truly atrocious formulations through no fault of their own