Ollie Randall

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Hallucinating spires

Kier Starmer wearing a poppy on Remembrance Sunday

"Keir Starmer lights up the cenotaph ceremony with a jaunty splash of red"

The angle cunningly hides the absolute shambles that's currently the RadCam's lawn

It's paywalled for me - does the article address the graph's tantalising uptick between 2010 and 2016?

Congratulations to all four! The results were announced at a very enjoyable gathering of historians yesterday

YouTube video by The Whitest Kids U'Know WKUK It's Illegal to Say...

youtu.be/rUft70iHHdM?...

Ollie took his research to a new level by actually playing for @authorscc.bsky.social over the weekend!

My article on cricket and Edwardian writers has been shortlisted for an RHS prize - if you want to give it a read, there's a link in this RHS spotlight

And presumably, after other events today, for this to be blocked in court, two SCOTUS judges would have to have a road to Damascus moment

Just a reminder that generative AI is theft of labor and intellectual property, uses vast amounts of energy/ water, provides at best mediocre results (if not outright lies or misinformation), actually affects your ability to think over time (mind duh), and is in general a really fucking bad idea.

It turns out that Dr Kill, self-styled figurehead of the night, may not be as benign as he first appears

The National Front and environmental politics, 1967–90 Abstract. The green entanglements of the inter-war British far right are well-documented. Martin Pugh has drawn attention to the predominantly rural, agric

Over the next three weeks, we're highlighting the 8 articles and 8 books shortlisted for this year's RHS Early Career Article and First Book Prizes.

Today we feature Beth Bhargava, ‘The National Front and Environmental Politics, 1967–90’, Modern British History bit.ly/43DNNrR 1/2

If we aren't supposed to debate tactics anymore and we must accept that all the ways of opposing MAGA are equal, it's a great day for Chuck Schumer

"Liberal Demosbacs" deserves to enter the lexicon

Omar Little from The Wire, wearing a t-shirt that reads "I Am The American Dream"

I'd like to propose some research on fictional characters who epitomise the American Dream, particularly economic freedom, entrepreneurship and innovation

Omar Little from The Wire, wearing a t-shirt that says "I Am The American Dream"

Portrait of a famous American character who epitomised economic freedom, entrepreneurship and innovation

Really good point, which they'd realise if they had any academic literacy.

There's been a hell of a lot written on the American Dream from F. Scott Fitzgerald onward, and not much of it has said "Yep, in conclusion, the American Dream is unproblematically great"

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

The most revealing part of the call is the genuine belief that "parents lived in a council house" = "parents were gifted a council house by the government, which they now own despite not paying market rates for it".

It says so much about the state of our information environment

@moudhy.bsky.social hi - we met briefly at your Blackwells event in April. PhD-writing has interfered with finishing your book until now, but I just got to the end and I loved it. I hope it's been as big a success as it deserves! Thank you for humanising the topic so well

I'm excited to be shortlisted for the @royalhistsoc.org's early career article prize, for my piece on Edwardian writers playing cricket! It's a really interesting and eclectic list:

blog.royalhistsoc.org/2025/05/28/r...

The new five-party system, in which the parties are called Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Reform and Reform

This is such a funny putdown to say in a disdainful voice

This is a hypothetical about something that has already happened, and happened differently. Which is pretty damn close to a definition of "wishful thinking"

I've been saying "he's not Caesar, he's closer to Marius, but that's Still Really Bad" for about eight years

And then, if I recall correctly, the media narrative was "what makes certain unreasonable jerks feel entitled to boo a fellow patron who was minding their own business?"

Clay Davis from The Wire, saying "I'll take any motherfucker's money if he givin' it away"

The new question is "are there signs of a pro-democracy revolution yet?"

Hi - please can you weigh in here, because I'm always wary of the news media's understanding of ancient history. This looks like... the biggest single advance in cuneiform studies, and in our understanding of the Akkadian Empire, in decades?!