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mattsymonds.bsky.social
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Thinking a lot lately of how my late father lost his political faith after Thatcher’s victory — a patrician Toryism both instinctive and inculcated, which believed in a landed gentry governing with a concern for “the poor”, and how he slowly pieced together a much weirder radicalism in its place.

S*M*A*S*H walked so Kneecap could run

what’s that? foot-ball you say? no, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of it

Amateurs de #typographie ? La nouvelle version de la Base de Typographie de la Renaissance #BaTyR est désormais accessible en ligne ! Ce projet financé par @agencerecherche.bsky.social s'inscrit dans le cadre du projet #TypoReF porté par le @cesrtours.bsky.social. batyr.univ-tours.fr/fr/

Registration open! Excited about this roundtable bringing together the brains of @sameen-mohsin.bsky.social @kabcommons.bsky.social @worsted.bsky.social from @mrcwarwick.bsky.social & Ansar Ahmed Ullah from the Swadhinata Trust 19 May, 6-8pm, @rshc.bsky.social: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/changing-t...

Some background on the work of Hereford Cathedral librarians in bringing the letter fragment to notice

Better late than never, and after thirty years of membership subs, I’ve resigned from the Labour Party. Trans rights are human rights, trans men are men, and trans women are women. Fuck your clarity.

friends fear he is reading The Invisibles again again

The current negotiation strategy is 'the President just lost a negotiation with an island full of penguins, but just watch as he outplays the Chinese government'.

Parmi les testaments conservés dans les archives de la ville de Bristol se trouve celui de Thomas Powell, "cloth-maker", mort en 1611, avec la note suivante : « There is a note saying Powell died after a fight with a cat ». I have questions.

This is literally the exact opposite of what Threads is about

No matter the weather, it is always winter on the platforms at Bury St Edmunds train station, where the wind carries a Siberian chill along with a Proustian sniff of sugar beet processing.

Let us go then, you and I, Where the Dow Jones has tanked against the sky

Want to know more about our #Arabic language manuscript collection? Our latest British Library/NT doctoral fellow, @samuscript.bsky.social, surveyed 130+ manuscripts spanning 300 years, at @britishlibrary.bsky.social and @nationaltrust.bsky.social. Read Sam's report: nt.iro.bl.uk/concern/repo...

Call for Papers: ‘Built with books: shaping the shelves of the early modern library’ Deadline 16th May 2025 9 –10 September 2025 at UCL, London

PhD Studentship available! @ihr.bsky.social and Historic Royal Palaces AHRC CDP project on the Tower of London and Londoners, late medieval and Tudor. Focus on looking at everyday people supplying the Tower, especially migrants, also global commodities. Full fees + stipend - UK or international

Our project on early donations to the Bodleian Library meant that @drallotment.bsky.social and @annalujz.bsky.social spent many hours at the Bod working on provenance research, the fruits of which can now be found inside SOLO, the Bodleian's online catalogue. ebdo.org.uk/2025/03/31/i...

A fairly good self-diagnostic tool is seeing whether today is the day I’ll crack and actually read the FT’s Watches supplement. Not today, satan.

I for one welcome our four-hundred-year-old penguin author overduchess.

'Ploughing.' (c1825) Thomas Churchyard was a lawyer and part-time artist who lived in Woodbridge, Suffolk and produced numerous views of the local area. In this beautiful painting on pine panel, he's used the grain of wood to add a patterning to the sky.

today’s wtaf moment www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

that point in a will when it's time to get the popcorn out:

Scene from a multi-Doctor Doctor Who story wherein the Doctor is played by (i) me in my twenties and (ii) me in my forties

Come do a PhD with Andreas Stynen and me! On witchcraft heritage and historical culture in the Low Countries since 1800 (excellent knowledge of Dutch is essential) #hextag www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

going to start referring to white men who aren’t qualified for their jobs as “nsr hires” (nepotism, sexism & racism)

Me, cheerfully choosing not to watch Adolescence or have an opinion on smart phones or young people having smart phones or what the writer of Adolescence chooses to say about young people having smart phones

🔊 UCL are looking for a Lecturer in Digital History, in any area of history, and with a specialism in any computational method(s). Deadline 7 April. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMI974/l...

vee much me with Aristophanes

Do you like humanities data? Do you like project documentation that goes into quite a bit of detail about what that data is/are*, the methodologies used, the decisions that were made, and the alternatives that weren't? Then hoo boy do we have the pdf for you! *delete as appropriate

What better way to make our bluesky debut then sharing the news of our latest dataset release, from our Shaping Scholarship project about early donations of books, manuscripts and money to the Bodleian Library! Do download, play around, and get in touch! www.ebdo.org.uk/data

For anyone interested in the early Bodleian Library or early modern book owners, the Shaping Scholarship project at CELL, UCL has made the project data available: ebdo.org.uk/data/ It details every officially recorded donation made c. 1600-1620, plus some extras, which is around 10,000 items.

Call for papers! Are you working on a Neo-Latin or Neo-Greek research project? This online event is an opportunity for PhD students and early career researchers to present their work, exchange ideas, and receive feedback from scholars in the field. Find out more:

Digging back through old notes and I re-found my favorite example of how #earlymodern postal officials were absolutely thinking in terms of networks 🤩 #digitalhistory #dataviz 🗃️

Our Centre’s Director @samsonaws.bsky.social is giving an inaugural lecture on 28th May, please come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/time-frame...

"Corporate academia is subverting academic life. It’s destroying academia from within." Neat to have BS jobs & the managerial cadre who make up work to justify their own job linked back to our responsibilities to call it out --we're being distracted while critical thought has seldom been more vital

It's Marie-Curie time again! Feel free to get in touch if you're 2-8 years post-PhD, don't work in Ireland, and would like to do a pretty well-paid two-year postdoc with me. General details about the program are available here: marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/post...

Looking For Dursley has been nominated (Best Factual) for an RTS Award. We were only able to make it thanks to silly old Doctor Who & its fans: a testament to it and to them. Dursley (a talented young man whose life was cut short by HIV/AIDS) was just one of many: it was important to tell his story.