Miranda Emmerson/Davies
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mirandaemmerson.bsky.social
Miranda Emmerson/Davies
@mirandaemmerson.bsky.social
970 followers 800 following 520 posts
Novelist (4th Estate); dramatist (BBC); and academic looking at radio, BBC history and British national identities. Currently exploring narratives around women's boxing at University of South Wales. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇫🇷🇵🇱
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There’s a sort of gulf in my (our) generation between people who grew up in multicultural areas of huge cities and everyone else. In that I’ll describe the levels of racist violence; the fact the NF were on our council; organised in the pub behind our house - and people look at you like you’re mad.
Reposted by Miranda Emmerson/Davies
Roger Sale, a fondly-remembered University of Washington professor, reviewed hundreds of novels in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, he selected 15 “Neglected Recent American Novels" for The American Scholar:

neglectedbooks.com/?...
My youngest is very partial to a fancy bookmark. An ornate library card and a fancy bookmark every December for 6 visits a year. Or a poster. 6 visits a year and you get a pick of some really cool book cover/graphic art posters which aren’t available to buy. I’d have gone for that!
Because (broadly) we construct romantic relationships with the woman taking the vulnerable, passive, receiver part. Same reason that Nancy Sinatra managed to persuade the songwriter of These Boots Were Made for Walking to change it from a man’s to a woman’s song, because it felt too mean as it was.
Very pertinent thread 👇
My partner makes TV ads. One of the main reasons so many are diversely cast is so that they can be used in a number of global markets simultaneously.
Today, UK Reform party MP Sarah Pochin told Talk TV "it drives me mad seeing adverts full of Black people, full of Asian people ... People who are anything other than white."
Every time they interviewed young Caerphilly voters they all said they were swinging behind Plaid to block Reform. The Plaid candidate is well known and liked (and people are furious at Labour) but it was very tactical.
I had a similar response. I’m more ADHD and can do small talk but have a habit of a) being much too honest b) plunging into the honest bit of the conversation with both feet and whether the other person is ready or not c) wanting to talk about *everything* so all conversations last 3+ hours.
I’m rubbish at promoting my own work but I have a story in this cracking and ridiculously diverse anthology. Just out of the launch and in awe of my fellow writers….
Sorry, mid 80s to start of the 90s…
Yes. UEFA banned English football fans from European matches in the early 90s, I think.
I’ve moved increasingly over to audio for fiction (this is partly because I’m dyslexic and have to read for my academic day job and just wouldn’t consume fiction if I had to read it as well!)

But I know that quite a number of my friends have moved over to audio as well.

Am trying to use Libro.fm
Buy audiobooks & support local bookstores
Libro.fm makes it possible for you to buy audiobooks directly through local bookstores.
Libro.fm
Reposted by Miranda Emmerson/Davies
There are very few industries in which Britain can genuinely still claim to be a world leader - two of them are the creative sector and higher education. You'd never know it from listening to the Tories, lol.
My English degree led to: working in comms for multiple charities; health journalism; working in accessible comms for people with a learning disability; writing novels; writing drama for the BBC; and researching the cultural construction of Britain’s national identities. It’s a great degree.
So, the plan is to cut English, the arts, and sociology - the degrees that actually study culture - while on another part of your platform claiming to “defend” British culture.

It’s performance nationalism with a reading age of seven.
Reposted by Miranda Emmerson/Davies
We utterly condemn what appears to have been an arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven.
This is basically true. With the caveat ‘no *living* single person’ but I know that’s what you meant.
Portions of the right and left are both playing games with the hierarchy of victimhood (generally in different directions). It is up to all of us who believe in a multicultural Britain and the ethics of tolerance and non-violence to resist this pernicious sorting hat of guilt and blame.
It would be great to see news and social media coverage linking attacks on Muslim and Jewish spaces as violence directed at minority groups and driven by conspiracy theories, racism and ignorance - as they both are.
It would be really helpful if we could start talking in a joined-up way about the desecration of non-Christian religious spaces. Islamophobia and antisemitism rises and falls together. The far right wants to drive a wedge between the Muslim and Jewish communities of Britain but we can all resist.
Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Peacehaven: Fire at East Sussex mosque probed as 'hate crime'
Video appears to show two people in balaclavas at the mosque before a large blaze spreads.
www.bbc.co.uk
It’s never occurred to me to do it though I do always flag to the platform itself.
I mean, everything is really awful but people are still making good stuff…
Trying to anaesthetise the pain of the world with art.

In the past 48 hours I’ve downed bilingual Romeo a Juliet (Welsh and English) which I really enjoyed. And seen One Battle After Another which (with normal PTA reservations) I enjoyed immensely. And read half of The Names which is excellent.
Reposted by Miranda Emmerson/Davies
Encountering the strange mixture of sadness and riotous absurdity at the heart of this show at the age of 15 changed my life.

This is a wonderful and nuanced assessment, almost fifty years later.
"The wallpaper was busier maybe, the world was browner, but essentially it was the same world, where telephones were answered with a string of digits and time flowed begrudgingly forwards like gravy."

I wrote about my favourite sitcom of all time.

madeleinebrettingham.substack.com/p/that-is-wh...
She’s gorgeous but also tasteful - an impressive duo!
Reposted by Miranda Emmerson/Davies
Amateur view. AI bubble shows that there is too much money chasing too few opportunities for genuine innovation. The solution is to take a medium/long view and put much more funding into basic science in universities rather than cutting as is happening now. (But I would say that wouldn’t I?)