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michaelthornhill.bsky.social
Book: Road to Suez - Battle of the Canal Zone | Current research: technique & etiquette of informal empire in Egypt | ODNB: ME rulers, colonial officials & diplomats, punk & post-punk moguls and musicians
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Durutti Column, Sing to Me m.youtube.com/watch?v=kdXI...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Apropos of Caroline Polachek turning 40 yesterday, my three favourite albums of this year: These New Puritans, Oklou and Caroline 2. Very excited that Durutti Column (perennial top 5 Spotify for me) and Caroline Polachek are featured on new Blood Orange track coming in next few days.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

LCD Soundsystem at Brixton Academy last night. It was hot! Highlight for this old New Order fan: James Murphy slipping mid song into Your Silent Face.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

The Fall, Lay of the Land, with the Michael Clark dance company. m.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Lv...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Helped by the familiarity of Hamlet (the play was much shorter than usual), the superb orchestration of Hail to the Thief, and the brilliant cast. musicians and staging, this really was fantastic. There was also a little something of Michael Clark in there.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

My article from Al-Ahram Weekly from twenty years ago on the Anglo-Egyptian Defence Treaty of 1954 - seventy years ago. Post 2011, Al-Ahram Weekly has changed, not least in what is archived and searchable.

submitted 414 days ago • 0 comments

This article no longer up on Al-Ahram Weekly. Concerns the events which were later commemorated as Police Day, following a British military intervention in “independent” Egypt on 25 January 1952.

submitted 414 days ago • 0 comments

‘I couldn't have wished a more squalid exit for a man I have always disliked & distrusted’. Clarissa Eden on Harold Macmillan’s resignation in 1963. Quoted by Hugo Vickers in ODNB entry for CE just published. One suspects her husband felt the same.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Eights Week

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

m.youtube.com/watch?v=mK44...

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast Bob Dylan, 84 today m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj_d...

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

#internationalsynthday new order at the Ukrainian National Home, 1981 early version of Temptation m.youtube.com/watch?v=tf-G...

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Pavement was willfully ironic and averse to canonization. An aggressively heady new movie the 90s band inspired thumbs its nose at the epic rock bio-pic.

submitted 33 days ago • 5 comments

Meant to be focusing on Farida but got distracted by West Country radical, Dingle Foot (brother of ex-Lab leader). Dingle - a name which needs bringing back - became lawyer of choice in countries undergoing decolonisation. A Methodist who drank alot, he choked to death on a sandwich in Hong Kong.

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

“The stuffing loss made me hit a timelock. I ended up in the 1990s I’ve been there for 125 years…”

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

Last photo of Joy Division's Ian Curtis - Thursday, May 15th, 1980, at the ‘Photo Me’ booth in Woolworths Macclesfield.

submitted 37 days ago • 7 comments

Strummer with a beard in April Paris in 1982. He had two daughters with Gaby Salter, Jazz (b. 1984) and Lola (b.1986).

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

Combat Rock, released on this day in 1982. Here’s my Oxford DNB assessment of how conflicted Joe Strummer was at the time.

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

pitchfork.com/thepitch/rad...

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

Message to Trump: Let America be America m.youtube.com/watch?v=v40L...

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

Hardboiled in style and told via chronological vignettes of band and personal history, To Hell With Poverty is an addictive read. Fifties London, sixties Kent and seventies Leeds are all evoked as sources for JK’s pivotal contributions to the Go4’s brilliantly jagged, skinny, political music.

submitted 49 days ago • 1 comment

The conclusion to Noel Annan’s brilliantly feline Our Age concludes that his generation failed to prevent the societal forces that produced Thatcher. It also suggests that the West in the 21st century might side again with an autocratic Russia. With Reform doing so well today (+Trump), one wonders

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

Reform not making which headway in Red Summertown.

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

Nice: “Massive wealth was present at Trump’s inauguration, which took place in the Capitol rotunda that was vandalised four years ago when his supporters tried to overturn an election.”

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

Looking forward to reading this.

submitted 53 days ago • 1 comment