Alexander Thom

We should take this as seriously as the CEO of Subway saying he couldn't imaginine raising a child without a footlong meatball on hearty Italian.

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun (b.1558), Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I, painted about 1600. (University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute)

There is an English major writing for The Onion.

"If the democratic state does not wish to give itself up, then it must resort to intolerance toward the enemy of the constitution."

Jürgen Habermas, 2004.

John Samuel Harpham - The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery

Sounds exciting:

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[...]How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were most powerfully expressed in Roman law. [...]"
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✨ The York Magic and Witchcraft Conference is back for 2026! ✨
Join us in historic York from 24–26 June as we explore the mysteries of Nature and the Supernatural. 🪄🌿
Submit your abstracts by 14 March 2026 to magicwitchcraft2024@gmail.com ☺️

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Suffice to say, Colin, we're overdue a good book on the topic!

On some level, perhaps it also gathers some rhetorical force from an extrapolated ideal of discrete functions/purposes all working for common benefit. This is rarely borne out on closer inspection of any specific body (social or biological). But the idea is a powerful one.

But this is a bit of a niche that I'm still trying to think through too. I think, after Esposito, I notice how bodies often imply subordination to 'heads'?

In medieval/Renaissance, lots has been done on body politic/body natural—Kantorowicz alludes to monastic corporations in the preface. Most standard accounts of English corp. law will address monastic origins (see J. H. Baker for example). I found Esposito's Persons and Things usefully provocative.

My jam! The Church as the Body of Christ, i.e. an apparent whole constituted by individual members. This furnishes the legal logic of the corporation—emphasis on corpus—through which monks could own assets communally, rather than individually. Corporations emerge as an equivocation of possession.

As a culture, we collectively overuse medical vocabulary to make our arguments sound more precise and more authoritative—much as a prior age used theological metaphors. However, physicians are the first to acknowledge that many of their terms-of-art are loosely indicative and usefully vague.

Computer, please summarize everything PG Wodehouse ever wrote in ten seconds

It's not the students' work ethics. I have students who work until 3am turn up and try to make contributions at 9am.

The shifts needed to survive is noticeably higher than even ten years ago, when I was an UG.

The reality is that students are poorer, paying more, and have less time than ever.

Of course, there's probably a very basic piece of psychoanalytic criticism that would've helped me notice this years ago.

Thinking about revenge less as a form of interpersonal score-settling than as a didactic and theatrical impulse—'I'll show them'. Ideally, in front of others. The symmetry of injuries often suggests a restaging of the inciting trauma(s), whose cathartic output is noticeable but inadequate.

This is right up my street. Looking forward to reading this!

Updated conference bio.

Del Toro's Frankenstein is visually lavish and restores the creature's eloquence and sympathy—it ultimately relishes the spectacle and sentiment of violent revenge, rather than the novel's keen sense in which both men are coarsened by it. The Arctic is a set-piece, rather than a logical end-point.

Creating the US SA was always and obviously the idea.

"What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody, is that things cannot go on in their present way" – The Times, May 1975

“It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life” – Professor Stephen Haseler, 1975

Oh no! Absolutely not embarrassing at all! It's by far his least known poem, very few Shakespeare enthusiasts have even heard of it, let alone read it—but turtle doves and mortality brought it to mind. I look forward to reading the essay in either case!

Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd, in cinders lie.

Death is now the Phoenix' nest,
And the Turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest...

What a spectacular inaugural lecture on accents, ideas of 'standard' language, and linguistic (in)justices by @snelljulia.bsky.social! Critical, precise, yet tempered by a profoundly humane attitude to teachers and pupils alike. Bravo, Professor Snell!

Happy birthday to @bodleian.ox.ac.uk, which first opened its doors #otd in 1602. 423 years young today!

What we're watching: A new take on "Frankenstein," a lavish legal drama starring Kim Kardashian and a Tracy Morgan-led spinoff.

sometimes an Oxford comma can make all the difference

Didn't we all go into academia for fresh flowers, Greek grammar, and resentful murder?

There's aspects of this story that are of entirely legitimate interest: money laundering, rates avoidance, evasion of trading standards. There are systemic issues to tighten up here.

But I wish it made clear that not allowing asylum seekers to work is forcing many into this untaxed shadow economy.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.