Roger Luckhurst
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theprofrog.bsky.social
Roger Luckhurst
@theprofrog.bsky.social

academic/freelance writer, on Gothic, Science Fiction. Next up: Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead (October 2025).

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic and since 2020 the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College. He was appointed professor in modern and contemporary literature in the Department of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London in 2008 and was distinguished visiting professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction. Luckhurst is notable for his introductions and editorships to the Oxford World's Classics series volumes -- Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of a Lady, H.P. Lovecraft's Classic Horror Tales, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Time Machine -- and for his books on J. G. Ballard (1997), The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005) The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy, and Zombies: A Cultural History. He has also written two books for the British Film Institute classic film series on The Shining and Alien. .. more

Philosophy 28%
Art 23%

If Europe has to negotiate after all, could Macron suggest an exchange of Greenland for reversing the Louisiana Purchase and restoring the state to France? They had boats there, also

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Has anyone thought about reviving the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, then we could offer that to Trump too?

At the end of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple my friend leant over and said “Someone should lock Alex Garland up.”

My brother got sewage farm manager, which is weirdly specific

And yet still David Willetts keeps failing upwards! Lord Disaster of Catastrofuck
I left university in 2019 with £49,600 of debt. A few months later, I became an MP and have since received a salary that puts me in the top 5% in the country. 6 years on, the repayments from my salary have brought this total to down to £48,600 - just £1,000 less.

i.m. my mother Sally Luckhurst, who would have been 94 today, but who took her own life aged 58, on the day Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990 — beat that for a juxtaposition. I am always slightly haunted by her lack of digital trace, so here’s one of the few photos I have from happier days, c.1958

I would listen to this interview with Michael Gove on Radio 4 a bit later, but I suddenly remembered that I have an appointment to have my ears sewn into Jeff Bezos and fired into space
I left university in 2019 with £49,600 of debt. A few months later, I became an MP and have since received a salary that puts me in the top 5% in the country. 6 years on, the repayments from my salary have brought this total to down to £48,600 - just £1,000 less.

Always great to see one French writer being really bitchy about another French writer!

Tough day

'Have you looked at our logo recently? ... Are we the baddies?'
Ukip have submitted a new logo and slogan to the Electoral Commission, swapping the £ pound sterling symbol for a cross, that looks very much like it is modelled on the Iron Cross used by Prussia & Germany 1871-1918 and Hitler's Nazi regime from 1933-45
Ukip have submitted a new logo and slogan to the Electoral Commission, swapping the £ pound sterling symbol for a cross, that looks very much like it is modelled on the Iron Cross used by Prussia & Germany 1871-1918 and Hitler's Nazi regime from 1933-45

We apologise for the disruption to the usual Monday morning emergency fluffy kitten service

A hematologist just said to me: ‘You look like the sort of person it would be difficult to get blood out of.’ #dry #dessicated #donnish

this pretty much balances out all the negative news, right?

If you’re looking for positive news, I can report that my freakishly swollen elbow has settled down a bit and I now have two elbows of roughly the same size and consistency for the first time in 2026

Today I did a spot of editing in the morning and then after lunch entered into the first bumpy foothills of the next world war. How about you?

That’s exactly what I did, with the Stan Laurel quote in my head “Life isn’t short enough”.

Alarming email for a professor to receive

I’ve only ever walked out of one cinema showing in my life and that was a Bela Tarr film. If violently not for me, this is a probably a measure of proper art, as I’m poorly educated and have no taste. RIP

Monday morning emergency fluffy kitten

‘In Paris with a bizarre elbow injury” was not a sentence I was expecting to write this early in the year. Still, it allowed a splendidly dismissive ‘Pffff!’ from a pharmacist early doors for 2026 too

email this morning from Keir Starmer, of all people, telling me that everything is going to be fine in 2026, so that's a relief because it was looking a bit dodgy back there for a while.

Nice pairing, just spotted in Daunt Books, Marylebone

Laura Poitras’s doc Cover-Up, about Seymour Hersh’s reporting from 1969 to the present, is oddly comforting: it’s not all getting worse, it’s always the same uniform shower of shits in power there always has been

Doesn’t J H Prynne do the New Year’s Day ocelot hurling competition on Grantchester Meadows?

Dr No: Academic Dissent from the Johnson era to Trump
make a Bond movie academic

Spectre: {Insert bacronym here}
make a Bond movie academic

No Time to Die: Techno-Fascism and Its Imaginaries of Immortality