Kendrick Oliver

The photograph shows a samurai warrior at the British Museum exhibit. The warrior is looking in the direction of a middle-aged man. Maybe it is unclear who is the viewer and who is the subject. Hence the highly amusing caption.

Samurai warrior attending the Middle-Aged History Professor Exhibit at the British Museum.

Bummed to have missed this talk due to train shenanigans. Guess I'll just have to read the book, sigh....

No legal expert, but I wonder if UCL felt more exposed to an adverse judgement than some other institutions. Rightly or wrongly, my university reverted to full in-person teaching in 2021-22, in line with the lifting of government restrictions. I think UCL adopted a more blended approach that year.

Extremely happy to discover this evening that James McMurtry is coming to London in October. Bought his first album back in 1989 and many of the others since, but have never yet managed to see him play live. Ticket now in (virtual) hand.

I wonder how/why that happened? Presumably the survivors knew, but they may not have been involved in the siting decision (or alternatively also preferred the memorial to be elsewhere).

Interesting. I couldn't really get oriented when I was there, but that was only for a few hours and assumed a lot had changed

May not be quite what you are looking for, but I think there are serious doubts about the location of the Bannockburn memorial.

Another chapter of THE BOOK completed. More than two years in the writing, as I took a break midway to work on something else. 181 footnotes. I learnt a lot about early quantum mechanics and interwar nuclear physics in the process. This was fun (sort of), but I'm very glad it's now done.

The photo shows Sam Lakeman and Cara Dillon on stage, Lakeman playing the guitar, Dillon singing (beautifully, obviously). Some greying or balding heads are interposed between the camera and the stage, because we are all getting old.

Living the 15-minute city dream. Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman tonight, literally playing down my street. Lovely stuff. Though they made my wife cry at one point, the bastards…

Yes, point taken.

An essay question for my future course on the MAGA moment: ‘Will Lewis: twat or c**t?’ I also wonder whether you can be a c**t and a twat at the same time? And why am I starring one and not the other?

To call him a ‘twat’ implies (I think) a kind of stupid obliviousness - that Lewis did not recognize, or choose to reflect on, the intentions of those who hired him and just served as the instrument of those intentions for as long as he was paid to do so.

The two terms have the same original referent, but slightly different resonances, to my ears. 'C**t' would have suggested some purposeful, self-motivated evil on the part of Lewis.

English person here. Sorry about Lewis, and the fire, and empire and everything. So I have now spent at least 30 minutes of my Sunday morning contemplating the use of the word ‘twat’ in this post. Another four-letter word ending in ‘t’ was available.

Three weeks ago my daughter bought me a large tub of flapjacks as a thank you. Lovely. I have had one every day since, sliding from delight towards enjoyment, into indifference, then boredom. I am now approaching despair. There is still a third of the tub left. The situation feels existential.

Something on visions of future catastrophe/societal meltdown/post-apocalyptic worlds, Malcolm? I'm doing a little side thing on solar storms and might be able to rustle up 15 minutes of content.

I am in this photograph, and if there is a similar one taken at HOTCUS 2026, I shall ruin that too. Brilliant conference, brilliant city, see you there, I hope...

but laced by very contemporary concerns about our dependence on networked infrastructure vulnerable to space weather effects. To bring this full circle, apparently the 2009 BBC adaptation of The Day of the Triffids attributes the mass blinding to a solar storm. Adding that to my view list...

(9/9)

I'm doing a little work right now on recent media accounts of the hazards presented by solar storms, which seem to borrow in some measure from fictive imaginings of catastrophes caused by alien invasion, nuclear war, pandemics etc,

(8/9)

The mass blindings were likely caused by new weapons placed in space designed, on command, to emit radiations that would damage the optic nerves of target populations, but which were accidentally set off by a field of comet debris passing around the earth.

(7/9)

The triffid seeds were carried around the world on high air currents, rather like fallout, having been developed in a secret Soviet facility in Kamchatka - a peninsula seen in the late 1940s as the probable base of Soviet military activity against the US, given its proximity to Alaska.

(6/9)

It's not surprising that a novel written in 1951 should bear the marks of atomic anxiety. But the catastrophe, the narrator suggests, involved some combination of radiative weapons, biological experimentation, and satellite technology (notably six years before Sputnik).

(5/9)

But the building’s appearance in Wyndham's novel more broadly attests to its significance in the mid-century British imagination. It was tall, modern, solid and had gates. To add its status within literary history, I also wrote much of my PhD thesis there.

(4/9)

First, perhaps a minor point, but I was struck by the fact that Senate House appears as the initial hub of efforts to coordinate a response to the catastrophe. Many people know about Orwell, 1984 and the Ministry of Truth.

(3/9)

The delay was probably a legacy of being seriously spooked by the 1981 BBC adaptation back when I was wee. But such an interesting book….

(2/9)

75 years late, I finally read John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, on a flight over to Detroit yesterday for a family funeral. (Shout out to the pilot who landed the plane like a chaste kiss in near white-out conditions at DTW)

(1/9)

This was great. It gave me the seeds of an idea for a new seminar on my special subject module. Future students be warned, things are going to get even darker....

I think this is right. The abrupt shift from 'well, we all have mad uncles and idiot citizens who vote for them' to 'no, enough of this' has been quite marked.

Animated, rotating cartoon trophy

Applications for the 2026 HOTCUS Article Prize and Early Career Article Prize are now open. Both awards recognise outstanding research on twentieth-century US history published in peer-reviewed journals during the 2025 calendar year, and each comes with a £100 prize.

An advertisement in the New York Times shows a woman sitting on her couch drinking from a cup, having interesting thoughts. The ad text reads: 'How to become an interesting person. I used to feel like the dullest person in the room. Everyone had something to say - except me. And then I found this app. Instead of wasting time scrolling, I started spending 15 mins a day learning from the world's best books. Now I always have something smart to say, and people actually listen. I recommend that everyone try micro learning with Headway.' Other educational resources are available.

'Now I always have something smart to say, and people actually listen.' A fascinating ad, encountered on the NYT app - it reminded me of those 1920s advertisements suggesting that a liberal use of Listerine might make the boys (or girls) like them more. 'Microlearning' sounds just the ticket...