An important piece written by @sarahmullin.bsky.social
valued member of our Secondary & Further Education Committee, on the seriously short-sighted decision to withdraw bursaries for ITE for English. We need MORE English teachers, not less.

Price of everything, value of nothing.

Price of everything, value of nothing.

This beautiful, honest, tender essay is the best rebuttal of AI infected teaching and learning, by Sean Cho A. The happy accident of the seminar - best when it's a bit of a mess.
therumpus.net/2025/10/02/h...

Check out this year's program for 'Romanticism Across Borders' virtual speaker series. I'm on there along with some of my favorite people 👯✨

Let's hope he doesn't run out and have no choice other than to watch his own recent films.

Same - I have 5 Pride & Prejudices and more Frankensteins than is medically advisable.

I directed Toby Jones when we recorded this series of readings of poems (& a bit of prose) by John Clare. Toby's readings lifted them off the page in ways I'd never experienced. & chief among all of them, is this, his reading of Clare's "Remembrances" (1832):
open.spotify.com/episode/45Ib...

This might be my favourite album, ever. John Martyn, One World (1977). Danny Thompson features, of course, & geese. First heard it in 1987 & it's still so thrilling, so easy, so chill, dark & yearning, bursting with love, Martyn's voice an instrument, such a mood.
open.spotify.com/album/1G8gcN...

Bob Logic in Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821) famously wears glasses with green lenses. Finally now I know why. I just thought he was trying to be cool, or covering up his perennial hangover.

R. S. Thomas, ‘The Bright Field’, from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975) #NationalPoetryDay

I directed Toby Jones when we recorded this series of readings of poems (& a bit of prose) by John Clare. Toby's readings lifted them off the page in ways I'd never experienced. & chief among all of them, is this, his reading of Clare's "Remembrances" (1832):
open.spotify.com/episode/45Ib...

Grand master, Tony Harrison, discussing V, BBC Bookclub, 2016:
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Jennifer Egan's "The Keep" is an absolutely brilliant novel. Whatever you think it is shaping up to be, it is suddenly not that, repeatedly. Egan is a masterful writer.

Out today: British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700 edited by John Goodridge & @adambridgen.bsky.social.

This book is published #OpenAccess, with funding from @acls1919.bsky.social 👏

'Workers, Radicals, Environmentalists and Feminists, Unite!'

uolpress.co.uk/book/british...

Great news!
JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month

www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Me too! Magic

praisd highly 'Comus' & 'L'Allegro' & 'II Penseroso' are those which I take up oftenest what beautiful description at the shut of evening is this: 'what time the laboured ox In his loose traces from the furrow came / And the swinkt hedger at his supper sat'

1824: Read in Milton his account of his blindness is very pathetic & I am always affected to tears when I read it. The opening & end of Paradise Lost I consider sublime & just as the beginning & finish of an Epic poem shoud be. I never could read Paradise regaind through tho I have heard it...

They certainly did!

My dad managed it in 1956?

Bless the Weather, live, just Danny Thompson and John Martyn, Dublin, 1987.
youtu.be/uy9pPdcrEsM?...

Danny Thompson, bassist extraordinaire, here with sparring partner John Martyn, Big Muff (from One World).

Genius. RIP.
youtu.be/u0DOSMrvQB4?...

Frogs, nightingales, moonlight, Tokaji - a perfect evening.

From H. Ellen Browning, "A Girl's Wanderings in Hungary" (1896):