Simon Kővesi

Tremendous!

2026 marks 100 years since the birth of Agnes Owens. A year-long centenary programme will celebrate her life, writing, and legacy through archives, exhibitions, reissues, and public events. Full details via link in bio.

a woman is talking to a man and says `` it 's like my life is buffering '' . ALT: a woman is talking to a man and says `` it 's like my life is buffering '' .

Finished an essay.
Sent it to the editor very late.
Debilitating regrets about almost all of it.
And repeat.

Cuba on the brink as Trump turns up the pressure: ‘There is going to be a real blockade’ Country is already suffering acute fuel shortage; experts say complete cutoff will be ‘catastrophic’ to its infrastructure

Doing this to Cuba, is like taking a cardboard bed away from a homeless person living in the street. It's cowardly, foul and unforgivable.
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

"Her student years are no longer an object of nostalgic desire. She sees them as a time of intellectual gentrification, of breaking with her origins. Her memory goes from romantic to critical."
Annie Ernaux, The Years

While rare things happen once 'in a blue moon' in English, in Czech they occur once 'in a Hungarian year' ('jednou za uherský rok').

It's been suggested that this is a legacy of the Ottoman wars in Central Europe, when military service in Hungary could stretch on indefinitely.

Trump blames Canada And tears our closest international relationship apart.

New in PN: Trump blames Canada

"It isn’t just Trump that Canada can’t trust. It’s us, the American people. Trump may have low approval now, but his numbers were even worse after J6 and we still returned him to power. At this point, no one can have faith that everything will go back to normal."

In this idealised 1820s illustration of Clare's cottage there might be a river (rut?) running in the middle of his street, ducks/coots having a paddle
There never was a river. Maybe it's a mixture of puddles & an open sewer? If so, Clare - for all his loco-descriptive precision - never mentioned it.

John Clare’s cottage, William Cowen (1791–1864), 1823, engraving, frontispiece to the second issue of The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems. The image features members of Clare’s family, including his mother, Mrs Clare. Mrs Emmerson writes to Clare on 14 March 1823: ‘I am quite of your opinion that it is much more poetical than the first print – the distant view of the Village Church, has a very picturesque effect – And there is – (but perhaps its only in my eye,) a sweet halo around your Cot, which mark it the abode of Genius! – but what may not my partial & poetical fancy not conceive? Why I cou’d almost say it’s a picture of “fairy-land” – with sylph’s sporting around your “cottage sill”-: – instead, of your good Dad & Mam & the dear little Anna.'

One of my favourite John Clare-associated images. John Clare’s cottage, by William Cowen (1791–1864), engraving, frontispiece to the second issue of The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1823).

Call for Papers: Cultural Materialism, Fascism and the Far Right, A Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Speaking in 1980 amid the New Right upsurge, Raymond Williams noted that ‘cultural struggle is absolutely crucial, because this is the terrain on which the interpretation of the crisis had to be es…

I’m editing a special issue of Key Words on cultural materialism, fascism and the far right for publication next year. Call for contributions and full details here: raymondwilliams.co.uk/2026/01/28/c...

Frankenstein given ‘servitude’ trigger warning Literature students at the University of Glasgow are being given modern ‘content advice’ on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece from 1818

Wait till the Telegraph finds out the creature is a Vegan who reads Milton.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01...

History is only ever about the ideology and prejudices of the present, and all the more so if your intention is total erasure.

Who was it Francis?

The first one looks a bit like the workers terraced houses in actual Jericho. The others just variations on posh old bits of the university.

That wouldn't open for me - but well done! - I love that museum and have been agog at its wonders since my first visit in 1991.

All museums should have their Spitfires hanging above their elephants. Kelvingrove Museum makes no sense but it rocks.

Marx, 1852
Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given & transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Norwegians Apply Boycott As Traitor's Punishment As a means of treating public enemies who are too powerfully protected to be dealt with otherwise the boycott has no equal. It is one of the few remaining weapons left in the hands of the conquered peoples of Europe. A new form has been invoked in Norway against the country's foremost literary figure, Knut Hamsun, author of Growth of the Soil and a Nobel prizewinner for literature. As such he has been honored by every Norwegian. Now he has chosen to become a follower of Quisling, the traitor who rules Norway as a Nazi agent. Nazi power prevent direct measures of punishment, but it does not keep his countrymen from letting him know how they hate and despise his desertion. Every house, therefore, that has owned a copy of Hamsun's books is now returning them to Hamsun. So many copies have been sent back that the postoffice in the little town where he lives has had to hire extra helpers to handle the mass. Every mail brings him more of his books, rejected by the people who once held them in honor. Authors, like other artists, are apt to be more sensitive than the average run of men. If this applies to Hamsun, he has fallen on evil days. --The Butte Daily Post, 25 Jan 1943

Knut Hamsun, Norwegian Nobel laureate in literature, sided with the Nazis so much he presented Goebbels with his Nobel medal in 1943 (which wasn't widely known until later).

Norwegians responded by mailing so many of Hamsun's books back to him that his local post office had to hire extra staff.

Ah hoorah thank you - I will pass that on to Andrew! About 74 people saw it.

I'll share with you a secret from a long career: institutions are more complicated than people, and people are plenty complicated. Anyone who thinks something should be cheap or easy is just inexperienced, unserious, or has an unstated goal.

This is a post about UTAX, but phew broadly applicable.

Fabulous!
One for the lists @bobeaglestone.bsky.social @nordengail.bsky.social

Oh yes, and actual crisis, of jobs, investment, declining A level (high school) uptake, student interest, AI, political and institutional and cultural all-spectrum irrelevance, and the right blaming us for everything from godlessness to Cuba.

Now all we get is the right wing press attacking us for warning students about the awful texts they are going to have to read.

Tom Paulin · Faculty at War

Nearly 44 years since English studies started its state of total & constant crisis. Tom Paulin calls it in @lrb.co.uk in 1982:

"Many academic teachers of English are at the moment united in the dismayed recognition that their subject is in a state of acute crisis."

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

It absolutely is Tracy.

We'd need a coffee & time to talk through it! It builds throughout - that "we" voice is part of the problem - because of course it means that some are included & some are not. & the latter is especially the case with immigrants, Muslims, foreigners in general. She tries to have it both ways?

Finished it today & did it at book club tonight. All felt it had an uncomfortable relationship with race & while sporadically critical of racism & worried about responses to immigration etc, actually rehearsed racist tropes too often.
What's your response to that?

It also over-egged Proust stuff!

Yes! What a unique & lucid thinker she is. How she sees history play out. It's a masterpiece.

bsky.app/profile/kove...

Good god