Briony Neilson

Grave

working on it

Typo of the day: turn-off-the-century

Street style – buying toasted pistachios from a street vendor in Morne-Rouge, Martinique, in 1899 (Gallica, BnF) 🗃️

This is a topic that's just been begging to be written about – looking forward to reading this.

This man in a straw hat selling wire baskets – his gaze piercing the shroud of smoke from his pipe – on the streets of Paris in 1899 (photo by Eugène Atget, MoMA)

This man in a straw hat selling wire baskets – his gaze piercing the shroud of smoke from his pipe – on the streets of Paris in 1899 (photo by Eugène Atget, MoMA)

2026.

Cambridge University Library, University Museum of Zoology and the University of Cambridge - Collections Connections Communities

Fully funded PhD studentship: ‘Recording nature and writing the self: time, entomology and the archive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. Closes 3 May.

With Ruth Abbott, Staffan Müller-Wille, Ed Turner & me. @theul.bsky.social @zoologymuseum.bsky.social

www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/initiatives/...

😹

you will supply your credit card details

"Dear Briony Neilson, Would You Like to be Speaker at Digestive Disease Meeting-Kyoto 2026"...

'Ploughed field' by Caspar David Friedrich, c.1830 (oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle)

When you look at this closely, the spidery cracks in the paint only seem to intensify the beauty.

The most beautiful thing you'll see all day: a depiction of a common thistle in watercolour, gouache and cut-out green paper pasted onto paper – the extraordinary work of multi-talented George Sand from 1848 (The Met)

A street sweeper and a pedestrian chat on a Sydney street, c. 1885 – an everyday scene surreptitiously captured with a hidden camera by Arthur Syer (State Library of NSW) 🗃

The most beautiful thing you'll see all day: a depiction of a common thistle in watercolour, gouache and cut-out green paper pasted onto paper – the extraordinary work of multi-talented George Sand from 1848 (The Met)

A street sweeper and a pedestrian chat on a Sydney street, c. 1885 – an everyday scene surreptitiously captured with a hidden camera by Arthur Syer (State Library of NSW) 🗃

All the obvious ones in the 5th (Gibert, Compagnie, Vrin etc). Also the bookshop inside the BnF, La brèche in the 12th and A La marge in Montreuil. (Sad about the good ones that are no more - biggest loss is Le point du jour).

Ambiguous facial expression and direct gaze of this woman hauling a large sack of coal up to the 5th floor of a Parisian apartment building in 1917 (Gallica, BnF) 🗃️

Ambiguous facial expression and direct gaze of this woman hauling a large sack of coal up to the 5th floor of a Parisian apartment building in 1917 (Gallica, BnF) 🗃️

Yes, agreed. Another that comes to mind is Love is the Devil (about Francis Bacon – modern artist not philosopher – though I saw it a million years ago and maybe I wouldn't think so now). Much more recently the recent biopic about Franz Fanon (boldly titled 'Fanon') was interesting.

Do literary biopics ever really hit the mark though? Maybe I'm overlooking one/some...?

(Franck Dubosc would sort of be ideal)

Let the antiquarians have their fun

Adelaide University would cancel the UN if they could

Grim indeed. (More commonly hair/blood from animals, I’m assuming?)

Roughly around what time were they there, do you remember?

^attempted murder

On the same poignant theme, this snippet from a Sydney newspaper in 1832 reports a prisoner on Norfolk Island facing execution for murder was claiming that the governor once ordered the heads of 400 prisoners be shaved so as to use the hair to bind the lime mortar in buildings in the penal colony 🗃️

TIL that hair shaved from the heads of convict women incarcerated at the Parramatta Female Factory in the 19th century was used as a binding agent in the mortar in the building's stonework. Convicts often had to build their own prisons, but the corporeal aspect of this is particularly poignant.