James Connolly

Responding to peer review feels like someone's telling you to unpack a full suitcase you spent ages packing, remove all underwear and every third sock, add twenty new pairs of shoes plus clothing clearly wrong for that destination BUT MAKE SURE IT ALL FITS BACK IN NICELY AND THE ZIP STILL CLOSES.

I was about to share the story of how I got conned by a man selling me a broken mirror, but it reflects badly on me.

Absolutely love losing hours of painstaking word-cutting and editing because a file didn't save correctly 🙃

Le fait que les journalistes se sentent obligés de nier cette histoire ridicule, c'est mauvais cygne...

My four-year-old who can just about write his own name just criticised my handwriting in a birthday card for his friend. Feels like there's some kind of allegory here. Or simply a a clear insight into quite how bad my writing is.

Darling it's better on Boulevard Gambetta in the ninteenth centuryyy...

Hope you slipped a "trenta percenta" in there.

After 4 years of speaking in French to my son, I finally managed to encourage him to say a whole sentence in French. Unfortunately, it's for the following rapid-fire conversation, which he finds hilarious and we're repeating loads:
Him: Papa a pété?
Me: Papa a pas pété!

Have you ever experienced French sirens (which sound like air-raid ones) blaring on the first Wednesday of the month? The first time I heard it was in the archives during my PhD, and it scared the life out of me. Couldn't believe everyone around me was so nonchalant about impending nuclear doom.

This conures an image of my mind of Farage as Finchy from The Office, complaining to Brent that he's put "this poison in my mind" by suggesting Four Non-Blondes sang Don't Speak. Just as ridiculous.

To be fair, he's got a more Irish first name than me, even if my namesake helps me out there.

My son starts primary school tomorrow. I got a particular pleasure ironing his Dunnes Store polo shirt, knowing that whilst he'll be the third generation Connolly to start school in London, even in a superficial way there'll still be a link to the familial homeland.

Well done!

Yeah, really hammers home the taken-for-granted approach we mentioned, doesn't it?

Possibly also Talbot Imlay, ‘Total war,’ Journal of Strategic Studies, 30:3 (2007), pp.547-570; Proctor, Civilians in a World at War (2010); Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice et citoyenneté (2013). But it seems most historians use 'mobilisation' without too much explanation of the term.

You may have already considered this, but Chickering, R., & Förster, S, Great War, total war: combat and mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (2013). Other stuff on total war, including edited volumes by Chickering and Förster, could be useful, given mobilisation as a key totalising factor.

Maybe with a third* off?

*Thiers/tiers, natch.

A minor victory - well done!

I'm sure we could all make a *communal* effort to email you to increase the numbers.

Solidarity if it happens! Our newly minted four-year-old has been waking up at 5.15-5.45 in the last two weeks or so 🙃

So it's more Weyland-Yawntani for you? I've found it interesting but a bit all over the place so far.

Not normally a fan of these types of signs, but this one isn't bad - and an odd find in a South London play café.

Overheard on a train: "I was in the reserve marines... And it was Jeremy Hunt's dad, Nick Hunt, who was the admiral in charge..." I guess his dad was getting the swear mispronunciations long before the famous journalistic slip-ups of a few years ago.

Comme quoi c'étaient pas des pauvres types...

Haha. I also use Calibri for drafts, partly because during my MA one lecturer told us sans serif fonts are better for screen reading, serif ones better for paper. In my mind, a final draft feels ready to send off, possibly even publish, and therefore *could* be printed.

I'm a Garamond Guy all the way, too!

The Algerian War - a ceasefire was declared on 19 March 1962 as a result of negotiations that resulted in the Evian Accords.

Conch blowing could help to alleviate sleep apnoea, study suggests Experts on condition affecting millions of people in UK give cautious welcome to findings but say more research needed

I get sleep apnoea, but I think I'd be too self-conchious to do this.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Today, my almost four-year-old son learnt how to ride a bike without stabilisers. He also, in a discussion about height, asked, "Are you the smallest man ever?" I was a proud but small man today.

YouTube video by Durzel The Day Today - Sinn Fein

Immediately made me think of this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Uh...