Emma Southon
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emmasouthon.bsky.social
Emma Southon
@emmasouthon.bsky.social
2.6K followers 150 following 950 posts
Roman Historian
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emmasouthon.bsky.social
Theres this self published author causing drama on booktok right now because they published a book the wrote when they were like 12 and it reads so much like this
December 4, 2025 at 5:51 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Obsessed with this person who has given a popular non fiction book one star for the crime of using contractions.
It repeatedly uses contractions (don't, won't) and capitalises random words.
December 3, 2025 at 5:07 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Don't suppose anyone younger and cooler than me recognises the person in the b&w poster here?
A blurry close up of some posters on a teenagers wall. One is of a person maybe a woman in profile in what I'm pretty sure is a 2000s era flame shirt but it's b&w so I can't be confident
December 2, 2025 at 5:05 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Sighing and reading this all timer article again www.gawkerarchives.com/culture/i-sh...
I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with this knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase "Dimes Square." To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody. Instead, I'm cursed to know that he is a senator from Texas who once stood next to a butter sculpture of a dairy cow and declared that his daughter's first words were "I like butter."
October 22, 2025 at 9:18 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Reading the new Penguin Classic Horror Anthology where they've copy pasted a load of 19th Century short stories together with such little effort that they've left the explanatory endnote numbers in the text of one of the stories but haven't included the endnotes. Just numbers floating in a void.
Photo of a page of a Henry James short story with a superscript 8 next to the name Petrarch. There is no 8th endnote. There are no endnotes
October 13, 2025 at 11:04 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
My book club who also all hate horses (unrelated) are having a great time and are appropriately frightened of you
September 27, 2025 at 4:28 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
I actually can't do a proper alt text for this image because words cannot express how much of a tangled nightmare this attempt at the Julio Claudian family tree is
The most confusing family tree you've ever seen but worse. Imagine someone dropped a family tree and it got tangled up like wires in the bottom of a drawer
September 2, 2025 at 3:43 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
This absolutely exceptional anecdote from Craig Brown's A Voyage Around the Queen made me laugh so hard I cried
The seasoned comedian Eric Sykes accepted an invitation to perform at Windsor Castle in 1954. He arrived in high spirits. In my mind my act was a riot. As a golfer imagines the shape of flight his golf ball will take before he makes a shot, so it was with me and my comedy routine, only in my case I visualised a hole in one. The Queen and Royal Family took the front seats, the Castle staff standing in ordered lines behind them. When his moment came, Sykes walked on to the opening bars of 'In a Monastery Garden' performed by Billy Cotton and his Band, and began an old routine in which he imitated bird noises. 'Here was the comedy that I'd imagined would bring the place down... I was now on my fifth or sixth impression of a bird noise. I'd done a thrush, a blackbird and a robin. But they were all met by silence. He then imitated a bicycle that hadn't been oiled. 'This didn't get a titter, but I knew that I would get them with my next impression. It was my favourite, the crow. Slapping the back of my neck, I cawed loudly as a crow will inevitably do when you are standing over a putt; and I hopped across the stage, flapping up my coat tails to simulate flight. The audience still made no response. At this point, he began to panic. 'Cold sweat was trickling from my armpits. I was up to my waist and sinking rapidly in a swamp of indifference. I was dying a death oh yes, there were stifled sniggers and hiccups, but these were from behind me. The audience, being the staff of Windsor Castle standing behind the seated royal party, were a frozen tableau, and the less reac-tion I got the more outrageous became my impressions. The only people laughing were Billy Cotton and his Band, and they were laughing at him rather than with him. 'But from the audience there was nothing but a perplexed silence. Aping a peacock with a bad leg, he tottered off the stage. Afterwards, a colleague passed on to him the Queen's only comment on his performance: 'He doesn't sing very well, does he?
August 31, 2025 at 9:57 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Love reading the New Yorker Archives. The past was fucking wild
One day shortly after he took up his duties at the Stonehill Publishing Company, he was browsing in a secondhand bookstore and came across a little out-of-print volume called “The Cocaine Papers,” which he thought might be of interest to the president of Stonehill, the late Jeffrey Steinberg, who was a cocaine addict. The book was a collection of Freud’s early writings on cocaine; during the eighteen-eighties, Freud had hoped to make his fame and fortune by developing medical uses for the drug, and he was then also an enthusiastic recreational user of it. Swales’ idle find led to the republication by Stonehill of “The Cocaine Papers,” under Robert Byck’s editorship. While the book was being prepared for the press, Swales fell out with Steinberg (he had turned out to be a drug dealer who was using the book firm as a front), quit Stonehill, and decided to write a book of his own on Freud’s involvement with cocaine.
August 8, 2025 at 2:51 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Consistently amused that photos on vinted are always a blurry close up of a top in dim lighting and photos on depop always look like professionally shot onlyfans teasers
A screenshot from vinted of a red top in closeup with a big shadow over it. The shape is unclear A screenshot from depop of a blond woman posing on her knees in a green shrug and nothing else on top hiding her breasts with her hands
August 2, 2025 at 7:47 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Screenshot of Amelia Dimoldenberg and Paul Mescal on Chicken Shop Date. Amelia asks "so what's Gaelic football" and Paul Mescal replies "it's where lots of sad sexy men run around in tiny shorts"
July 12, 2025 at 3:12 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
I have a notebook that I exclusively use when I'm playing point and click puzzle games and I really hope I never die mysteriously while carrying it
Pages of a notebook covered on nonsensical words, numbers and drawings Pages of a notebook covered on nonsensical words, numbers and drawings Pages of a notebook covered on nonsensical words, numbers and drawings
July 6, 2025 at 7:36 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
I like to imagine myself a sensible person with a healthy understanding of fashion and conspicuous consumption by GOD I WANT THIS THREE GRAND BAG
A man holding a black Dior tote bag. The bag looks like the cover of a French edition of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote but with Dior written where the author name should be. It is simple and cool as hell
July 3, 2025 at 8:04 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Just for you
July 1, 2025 at 1:27 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
There he is on TG4! @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social!
June 22, 2025 at 7:37 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Actually I've decided books are bad
Screenshot of an IG reel. Shows a drawing of a girl in a short white skirt on her knees in front of an anthropomorphised pig in cop uniform. Text reads " A Three Little Pigs retelling but she "blows" through three cops: "No matter how hard Iblow this house of brick, he never crumbles-insisting his seed fills me where his instinct demands"
June 19, 2025 at 9:34 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Made an emotional support chicken
Chonky knitted chicken made of beige wool with orange stripes sitting on a grey coffee table
June 14, 2025 at 4:25 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
One only tells the truth and one tells only lies
Two directional airport signs. The above one reads "boarding group b&c" and points left "boarding group a" and points right. The bottom has the same text but the arrows point in the opposite directions.
June 9, 2025 at 5:09 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
It's a cliche but damn academia was easy back in the day
Professional career Ó Ríordáin worked as a clerk in the Cork Motor Tax Office from 1936 until his early retirement due to health issues in 1965. In 1967, Ó Ríordáin was made a part-time lecturer in University College Cork. Between 1969 and 1976. Ó Ríodáin was UCC's writer in residence. Concurrent with his time in UCC, he wrote a weekly column in The Irish Times, which he continued until 1975.
June 3, 2025 at 4:46 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Why I will always read a Mark O'Connell piece
Donaldson is not himself a political figure. He doesn’t tend to weigh in on party-political questions, or express much interest in them. But there is a politics to his content. It reflects a world in which people are isolated and helpless, subjects of vast and inhuman economic mechanisms. People spending months alone in supermarkets; standing in large circles for as long as they can endure it; competing for private islands, houses, deliverance from their personal financial torments. People in states of gruelling seclusion; people in vast and impersonal crowds, pitted against one another in a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all. Loneliness, survival, isolation, and the divine intervention of an unimaginably wealthy and famous man: there is a politics to all this, all right, and it is the politics of our time. In its themes and preoccupations, its insistent motifs of financial precarity and arbitrary deliverance – its Lamborghinis and its private islands and its vast pyramids of cash – the oeuvre of MrBeast is like nothing so much as the dream of an entire culture. Donaldson might not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve.
June 3, 2025 at 8:35 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Just checked a penguin proof and it has a whole spiel about copyright. Fascinating
The moral right of the author has been asserted Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorised edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.
May 31, 2025 at 10:27 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Received a brand new proof and I think this is the first time I have seen this anti AI disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (Al) technologies is expressly prohibited. Harlequin also exercises their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserves this publicahon from the text and data mining exception.
May 31, 2025 at 9:53 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
Its giving Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
A screenshot from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy "wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous)"
May 28, 2025 at 9:28 AM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
It goes on like this for SO LONG
May 25, 2025 at 5:12 PM
emmasouthon.bsky.social
My gp's website has taken on such a stressed tone that I actually feel quite bad about needing to talk to a Dr
Screenshot of a webpage. Black writing in all caps on a white background reads "Welcome Changes to our systems - February 2024 AS YOU WILL HAVE HEARD WIDELY, GENERAL PRACTICE IS UNDER UNPRECEDENTED PRESSURE. WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH FUNDING or STAFF. THIS CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY OUR POLITICIANS. WE CAN ONLY APOLOGISE THAT THE SERVICE WE PROVIDE FALLS SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS. BLAME THE POLITICIANS.......NOT THE GPs EXAMPLES OF THE CHANGES WE HAVE HAD TO MAKE :- ROUTINE TELEPHONE ENQUIRIES WILL STOP AT 4pm EMERGENCY COVER WILL BE IN PLACE CAPPING OF TRIAGE SLOTS EACH DAY PRIORITISING WELL-BEING & SAFETY OF STAFF & PATIENTS ROBUST FOLLOWING OF RULES AROUND PRESCRIPTIONS & PRESCRIPTION COLLECTIONS"
May 25, 2025 at 5:02 PM