Jeremy Noel-Tod

A two-panel Little Bubbie Child comic. Top panel is the little bubbie child asking, "Dad, hwat was it like a livin' in the 90s?" Bottom panel is dad responding, "Sometimes you'd open a can a peanuts and they'd come snakes outta there."

Genuinely, if you live in the UK you should so the consultation just to find out some of the unbelievable details of what's being proposed. Even with their spin and obfuscation it's shocking

I‘ve messed around with Claude enough to believe that in at least one specific way, LLMs are going to transform serious journalism & humanities research, similar to what they’re doing for coding: turning bounded but unstructured information (read: archives) into structured machine-analyzable data.

I once had to ask an American student who was taking my Jane Austen summer school class in Cambridge not to return romantically by foot to the nearby stately home we had visited in a minibus as the land in between was a military firing range

I am sick, absolutely sick, of the retreat of civic society, the media and the other political parties in the face of Reform UK - one of the most existential threats the state structures have faced for decades.

A copy of The Translations of Seamus Heaney on a wooden surface.

New post!

I take an in-depth look at Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, alongside forays into Victorian translations by William Morris and the brilliantly named Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth.

This is based on an undergraduate lecture I gave at Oxford in 2020.

nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/02/09/o...

'Some wet mud and a lizard who was chasing his tail' well describes my day

The long, never-ending corner

Love to mark student work using a digital platform that is running slow and crashing. The streamlined online university is just around the corner now.

This is ground control to Major Tod

U A Fanthorpe ‘Patience Strong’ 1978 Patience Strong U A Fanthorpe   Everyone knows her name. Trite calendars Of rose-nooked cottages or winding ways Display her sentiments in homespun verse Disguised as prose. She has her tiny n…

The Quiet Corner pieces do seem to have been wallet sized. There's a similar story told in verse here barbellionsaid.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/u...

Ah, that's interesting -- Strong went on a trip to South Africa too. I first came across the idea through a passing reference in Kilvert's Diary, when someone shows him a pamphlet about it (and he thinks it would be amazing if true).

It's in the Listener, as part of his series 'The Poet and the Public'. Not a transcript exactly, more a summary with quotes.

After a Night in Camelot and Arden The life of Patience Strong, England's best-selling modern poet

I wrote about Patience Strong, almost certainly the best-selling English poet of the twentieth century, who wrote six poems a week for the Daily Mirror (all on a Monday morning) as well as a hit song, greeting cards and calendars, and whose print runs were in the 100,000s

POEM writing poems keeping rabbits each day the shite to be cleared and fresh straw to be laid

happy #smallpoemsunday! 💜

feel free to post small poems you wrote, or ones you like by other poets :)

here’s a little one I love by Tom Pickard~

Very interesting piece about a poet now forgotten

I don't! But I will look it up. Some of the Instagram poets offer a contemporary equivalent, I think, but I don't think I'll be writing about them until they publish an autobiography...

After a Night in Camelot and Arden The life of Patience Strong, England's best-selling modern poet

I wrote about Patience Strong, almost certainly the best-selling English poet of the twentieth century, who wrote six poems a week for the Daily Mirror (all on a Monday morning) as well as a hit song, greeting cards and calendars, and whose print runs were in the 100,000s

British values

The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online: Covers 500 Years of the “Vulgar Tongue” 'The three volumes of Green's Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this ...

The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online: Covers 500 Years of the “Vulgar Tongue”

A Fairer Pathway to Settlement: statement and accompanying consultation on earned settlement (accessible)

The government’s consultation on its proposed settlement proposals closes on Thursday. Over 130,000 responses had been received with a week to go & 232,000 people and 107,000 people signed two petitions about this debated in Westminster Hall on Mondsy
www.gov.uk/government/c...

This mural is just around the corner from MES’s preferred Bargain Booze. I’ve just remembered that this was placed on its shutters when he died.

This is what peak performance looks like

The Gospel of Matthew begins with ‘Math’

And they say poetry makes nothing happen

I looked into this and the story is that it’s a family business founded fifty years ago by a Kenyan pharmacist who named it after Daniel’s dad, the Poet Laureate (Cecil Day Lewis)

Nothing but bangers

O no